Multidisciplinary Institute in Artificial intelligence

The socio-communicative complexity hypothesis states that living in groups should increase the need for efficient communication in animals. Thanks to "Rookognise", a multitask neural network designed to automatically recognize which rook is vocalizing when, we plan to test this hypothesis in a comparative way, i.e. in social and non-social corvids, but also in human and non-human primates. Rookognise needs to be adapted to non-bird species and enhanced with visual recognition of individuals and behaviors. This project should help to identify key factors in the evolution of language (sociality, cognition, vocal learning) that are shared by corvids and primates. It will also help to identify key communicative attitudes in children and their role in the establishment of social networks and, more generally, the link between vocal and social integration. Finally, this project also has strong innovative potential for education and animal conservation and welfare.