Animals: General Engaged Projects
Further resources, if available, can be found in our full bibliography.
Diverse Intelligences
A global, multidisciplinary exploration of a world alive with brilliance. Our universe brims with intelligences. By exploring other minds, we can see ourselves in this dazzling constellation. Questions about intelligence are explored in a broad range of disciplines—neuroscience, philosophy, biology, computer science, anthropology, and many others. But researchers in these fields rarely have opportunities to work together. Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Diverse Intelligence (DI) initiative seeks to break down disciplinary boundaries and build a new scientific community. DI is a multiyear, global effort to understand a world alive with brilliance in many forms. Its mission is to promote open-minded, forward-looking inquiry in animal, human, and machine intelligences. We collaborate with leading experts and emerging scholars from around the globe, developing high-caliber projects that advance our comprehension of the constellation of intelligences.
ARCANI
ARCANI (Accelerating Research Collaboration on Artificial and Nature Intelligences) is an NSF-funded project catalyzing research on intelligence by bringing together global networks studying biological and artificial intelligences.
Earth Species Project
More than 8 million species share our planet. We only understand the language of one. Earth Species Project is the new frontier of interspecies understanding. They decode animal communication with advanced AI to illuminate the diverse intelligences on Earth. Their vision is a relationship with the rest of nature that allows the diversity of life to thrive. With exponential advances in AI and Large Language Models, decoding animal communication is no longer a question of if—it’s when. Earth Species project is building the first-ever large language models designed to analyze data from species across the Tree of Life. By listening more deeply, we can unlock a new relationship with the rest of nature.
MICO: The Massive Interspecies Communication Observatory
The Massive Interspecies Communication Observatory (MICO) is a nonprofit-university- industry partnership aimed at enabling rigorous study of communication between the earth’s species. MICO is designed to enable blind, randomized, and controlled studies of interspecies communication behavior at scale, in naturalistic environments.
Interspecies Internet
Interspecies Internet is a global multidisciplinary think-tank working to facilitate the acceleration of interspecies communication, with 4500+ members and affiliates including leading sector professionals. A primary premise of the project is that the Interspecies Internet could be used to link non-human species that are not collocated and leverage computational capacity to support the use of AI/ML methods in transducing signals from one species into coherent signals for another.
World Wildlife Fund
Since their founding in 1961, WWF has been committed to protecting nature and its resources. They understand that nature is our planet’s greatest asset, intrinsically linked to human survival—and that it needs our help. As the world’s leading conservation organization—with offices on six continents and in nearly 100 countries—their global reach includes the world’s most critical forests, river systems, wetlands, savannas, and ocean habitats. By conserving these places and supporting sustainable livelihoods within them, we can keep the planet in balance for people, wildlife, and the planet. In every place they work, WWF helps create and implement innovative solutions—scientific, technological, economic, and financial by partnering with businesses, governments, and scientists and by collaborating with Indigenous people and local communities, to center their needs and incorporate their knowledge.
Photo Credit: Grey long-eared bat (Plecotus austriacus); Rudmer Zwerver/Shutterstock