Artist Jiabao Li presents a more-than-human approach that challenges human-centered design, exploring interspecies collaboration through experimental art and ecological frameworks.

Dr. Arik Kershenbaum explores the diverse world of animal communication, challenging our human-centric view of meaning, investigating how animals encode information and perceive communication differently from linguistic species like ourselves.

In this talk, Kristin Andrews takes multiculturalism out of the human domain and explores some implications of the robust research program in animal culture.

“What’s in a name?” is an in-depth exploration of research on elephant communication. Mickey and his team have discovered that wild African elephants use name-like calls specific to individual receivers, suggesting that elephants, like humans, use arbitrary names. This finding sheds new light on elephant cognition and the evolution of language.

Melanie's lecture explores how human activities endanger species and disrupt ecosystems. She will introduce an NYU project focused on improving communication with other species, considering their perspectives, and including them in decisions to foster a fairer, more compassionate world.

Explore the intricate world of interspecies communication, as Catherine investigates the signals used by great apes and challenges traditional approaches. Join us to delve deeper into understanding other species and the evolutionary origins of our own through reimagined study methods.

Tim presents a groundbreaking self-supervised transformer model, TweetyBERT, for analyzing bird songs without human-labeled data. By operating directly on spectrograms, TweetyBERT offers insights into canary vocalizations' statistical structure, uncovering long-range rules shaping song sequences. This advancement promises rapid progress in understanding animal vocalizations, particularly for complex singers, eliminating the need for costly manual annotation.

Explore the fascinating world of bowerbirds. Join Sophia and guest Professor Gail as they delve into thought-provoking questions: Do bowerbirds make art? Can humans or computers mimic their creative process? , and more!

"Alfie and Me" tells the extraordinary tale of ecologist Carl Safina's unexpected bond with a wounded screech owl named Alfie. Through the Covid-19 lockdown, Alfie becomes a source of solace, challenging the boundaries between humans and the natural world. Safina explores the profound connections possible when we blur these boundaries and questions the losses from modern culture's detachment from the living world.

Discover the remarkable intelligence of bees as individuals. Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioral Ecology, presents decades of research, showcasing their ability to recognize faces, display emotions, count, use tools, solve problems, and more. He delves into the unique intricacies of bee brains, their evolution as foragers, and the ethical questions surrounding their consciousness and cognition.

Bats are virtuous vocal communicators because their ability to echolocate requires sophisticated vocal control and precise auditory perception. Some bat species are capable of learning and modifying their vocalizations based on the auditory feedback of conspecifics, others are prolific singers with an extremely high vocal output or engage in vocal turn-taking. Social vocalizations of bats encode a substantial amount of information, such as individual identity, sex, group affiliation, motivational status, etc. Decoding this information enables receivers to make informed decisions on resource allocation, mate choice, territorial defense, and cooperation.

In this presentation, Dr. Rébecca Kleinberger will present her research work at the intersection of new technology, animal-computer interaction, and the sonic environment. Drawing upon her extensive collaborative work with zoos, wildlife specialists, and conservation centers, Dr. Kleinberger's work primarily targets the enhancement of life for animals in managed care through auditory technological interventions.

Interspecies Library is the first archive dedicated to the study and advancement of artists’ books exploring alternative interspecies futures. Founded in 2019 by Oscar Salguero, the growing collection aspires to reflect our changing attitudes towards the non-human as well as our evolving acknowledgement of their agency, intelligence, and wisdom.

Join CEO Katie Zacarian and Senior AI Research Scientist Sara Keen as they explore some of the latest developments in AI, unpack key steps on ESP’s technical roadmap toward decode, and delve into some of the successes and ongoing challenges inherent in using these technologies to expand our understanding of the non-human world.