Startup Stash - ChatMan, Wiggle Dance & Crowening 🐝

But why? 

Animals are free migrants, they can carry information and resources around the world. So in essence they are sitting on a huge treasure of information that could help human progression. 

Until recently, decoding has mostly relied on painstaking observation. But interest has burgeoned in applying machine learning to deal with the huge amounts of data that can now be collected by modern animal-borne sensors.

Is this even possible?

The simple answer is Yes.

Like humans, animals also have various forms of non-verbal communication, like bees doing a special "wiggle dance" to indicate to each other that they should land on a specific flower. The translation algorithms the ESP is developing are designed to "work across all of biology, from worms to whales.

And despite the seemingly insurmountable challenges, ESP has made some progress.

An experimental algorithm developed by ESP can purportedly detect which individual in a noisy group of animals is “speaking." A second algorithm reportedly can generate mimicked animal calls to "talk" directly to them. A further project aims to develop an algorithm that ascertains how many call types a species has at its command.

They’re not the only ones doing this though…

Elodie Briefer, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen co-developed an algorithm that analyses pig grunts to tell whether the animal is experiencing a positive or negative emotion. Another, called DeepSqueak, judges whether rodents are in a stressed state based on their ultrasonic calls. A further initiative – Project CETI – plans to use machine learning to translate the communication of sperm whales.

Federal agencies hit a new milestone in 2021 after awarding $154.2 billion in contracts to small businesses in the last fiscal year. That figure, which was $8.5 billion higher compared to FY2020, amounts to roughly 27% of the total number of federal contracts awarded by the government. 

Despite such great feat in dollars, the overall number of small contractors has dwindled. In FY2021, sixty-five thousand small businesses received contracts, down about 40% over the last decade, according to SBA Administrator Isabel Guzman. 

One of the major issues behind this phenomenon, the SBA says, is the practice of consolidating multiple similar contracts, which makes the final awarded contracts so large that small and medium-sized businesses cannot take them on.

Furthermore, the amount of contracting dollars awarded to women-owned small businesses also fell short of the SBA's stated 5% goal for the year. In FY2021, the spending among this group clocked in at 4.63%, from 4.85% the year prior. 

On a brighter note though...

Small disadvantaged business spending hit 11% for the first time during the last fiscal year. Federal agencies also shelled out $72 billion to small business sub-contractors over that same period.