Ilaria Manco is a Research Scientist in the Magenta team at Google DeepMind. Her research spans music generation and understanding, with a current focus on new forms of musical interaction via controllable, real-time generative models. Ilaria received her PhD from Queen Mary University of London, where she developed multimodal representation learning approaches to connect music and language. During her doctoral work she also collaborated with Universal Music Group on large-scale audio-caption datasets and audio-language models.
Enrico Palumbo researches and builds Generative AI features for Search and Recommendations at Spotify, with a focus on agentic technologies and generative recommendations. Before joining Spotify, he was a Research Scientist at Amazon, developing language understanding models for Alexa in non-English locales. He holds a PhD on Knowledge Graph Embeddings for Recommender Systems, carried out jointly between the Polytechnic University of Turin, EURECOM, and Links Foundation.
Harin Lee is a multidisciplinary researcher combining large-scale data analysis with cross-cultural experiments to study the psychological foundations of music cognition and musical diversity worldwide. His research includes field experiments with Tsimané villagers in the Bolivian Amazon and developing human-in-the-loop online paradigms to investigate cultural evolution in artificial worlds. Currently a Junior Research Fellow at University of Cambridge, he earned his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.
Willem Zuidema is associate professor of NLP and Explainable AI at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC) in Amsterdam. He has published widely on computational models of language, including comparisons with music, animal communication and explorations of their evolutionary origins. He has done pioneering work in deep learning for NLP and interpretability methods for LSTMs and Transformers. He leads the InDeep consortium, focused on interpretability for text, speech and music, involving 7 PhD students and 5 universities in the Netherlands.