What are the key neural computations that give rise to behavior? Can infer from behavior the computations performed by the brain? How far can first principles take us to understand neural circuits and their computations? We are interested in brain functions that can be characterized by a computational goal encompassing sensory inputs and motor outputs. Our favorite examples are vocal production and vocal learning, which we study in songbirds using reductionist experimental and theoretical approaches.

We study vocal communication and social learning in bird groups. We developed a multimodal system for longitudinal observation of group dynamics using multiple cameras, microphones, and animal-borne wireless sensors. Our goal is to better understand the vocal learning dynamics in social settings.

We are deeply involved in the NCCR Evolving Language, collaboratively researching the significance of animal communication as an evolutionary precursor to human language. Part of this effort, we are designing VocallBase, the largest database of animal vocalizations encompassing 10'000 species and the most stringent annotations, see https://vocallbase.evolvinglanguage.ch/.

Our work also focuses on translating songbird research to the domain of natural language processing (NLP) and back. We expect much cross-fertilization between these research areas: On the one hand, NLP approaches are readily applicable to birdsong research, because there are many analytical similarities between songbird-syllable and human-word sequences. On the other hand, we recently discovered that songbirds’ strategy of assigning vocal errors during learning is equivalent to word mover's distance, a highly successful computational strategy for document and sentence retrieval. Thus, songbirds have used retrieval strategies millions of years before computational linguists have invented them. Most certainly, many more analogies are about to be discovered. Our NLP insights we integrate into Endoc, a smart science writing tool made available to researchers in Switzerland: https://endoc.ethz.ch/.