Mirco Ravanelli, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the Gina Cody School, has received the 2022 Amazon Research Award.
The award provides funds and Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to researchers studying a variety of topics and disciplines.
Ravanelli is one of 79 researchers across 54 universities worldwide selected for the award. He will receive funding under the AWS AI call for proposals for his research on machine learning algorithms and theory titled "Toward empathetic conversational AI."
A faculty member at the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science since 2022, Ravanelli's research centres on deep learning sequence processing, with a focus on Conversational AI. He has written over 50 research papers on deep learning, conversational AI and EEG signal processing.
He was a post-doctoral researcher at Mila - Québec from 2018 to 2021 under the supervision of the Turing Award professor Yoshua Bengio.
Ravanelli is also the founder of the SpeechBrain project, an open-source conversational AI and speech processing toolkit.