Mirco Ravanelli, PhD

Short Bio

I'm an Assistant Professor at Concordia University (Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science) working on deep learning for sequence processing, with a focus on Conversational AI. I'm also adjunct professor at the Université de Montréal (DIRO - Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle) and Associate Member at Mila - Quebec AI Institute.

I'm the author of more than 50 papers on deep learning, conversational AI, and EEG signal processing. I'm currently teaching machine learning courses for graduate and undergraduate students.

From January 2018 to December 2021, I was a post-doc researcher at Mila, working under the supervision of the Turing Award professor Yoshua Bengio.

I got my PhD. (with cum laude distinction) from the University of Trento in December 2017 working at the Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK) on "deep learning for speech recognition". My research activity was awarded several national and international prizes. I'm the creator and leader of the SpeechBrain project, which aims to build a radically new open-source speech processing toolkit.

Teaching

I'm currently teaching machine learning for graduate (COMP 6321) and undergraduate students (COMP 432)

Research Interests

My long-term research goal is to build machines that naturally converse with humans. This represents an essential step to reach higher levels of artificial intelligence. My research mainly focuses on deep learning methods for Conversational AI. I’m the author or co-author of more than 60 papers. My current research interests are cooperative deep learning, self-supervised learning, and the development of novel neural models for sequence processing.

I’m the founder and leader of the SpeechBrain project. SpeechBrain is an open-source conversational AI toolkit that is gaining popularity within the speech and deep learning communities.

Publication list