Interspecies: Decoding, Translation, and Interpretation

This three-day workshop is a follow-up to the April 2024 event, “Imagining Criteria and Frameworks for Decoding Communication in Other Species.” Whereas that meeting was largely aimed at developing criteria for determining successful communication or translation in a nonhuman species for the purposes of the XPrize design, this meeting will more directly probe the meaning of “decoding,” and the implications that a successful decoding would have for humans and animal subjects. Questions here include:

• How much data is required to extract meaningful signals or information from a set of observations? • How do we deal with problems of untranslatability and even encryption in natural signals, and how do we go about incorporating necessary context? • Are there neural correlates (organisms) or organizations of weights (LLMS) that might give us confidence that functional communication is taking place? • How might we use macroscopic properties beyond signaling to make inferences about intelligent behavior?

The workshop will be broken up into “case-study” sessions (mornings) and “principles” sessions (evenings) where field researchers and SFI researchers will present or lead discussion on each of these questions. Representatives from XPrize and from MOTH (More Than Human) will also be in attendance to present on an ethical framework they’ve developed (PEPP) for the deployment of Non-human Animal Communication Technologies (NACTs). And, Interspecies would ultimately like to explore the possibility of developing standards for scientific diplomacy, interspecifically, with a conservationist aim.

A smaller group from this workshop may remain Thursday, May 7th and Friday, May 8th, for more focused work in a two-day micro-working group to follow, hosted in the Noyce. A public event featuring to-be-selected participants from this workshop will be hosted later in the year at the Lensic, as part of SFI’s 2026 Community Lecture Series.