Nicolas Farrugia’s website

News - September 2023

A new associate prof has joined the team ! Welcome Axel Marmoret.

About me

I am assistant professor (HdR) at IMT Atlantique, an elite technical university in France. I am in the BRAIn team (Better Representations for Artificial Intelligence) together with Vincent Gripon, Giulia Lioi, Bastien Pasdeloup, Axel Marmoret and Mathieu Leonardon.

My research interests include developing innovative methods to better understand Sounds and the Brain using modern machine learning and deep learning. On the methods side, BRAIN develops methods based on Graphs, such as Graph Signal Processing and Graph neural networks. We are also contributing to few-shot learning, as well as on compressing deep learning architectures (see for examples here).

Regarding applications in Neuroscience, I am particularly interested in auditory / music perception, time perception and sensorimotor timing (see here) and the effect of music on the brain in healthy subjects and patients (see here), as well as involuntary musical imagery (a.k.a. earworms, see here and here). More recently, BRAIN has started to investigate the estimation of encoding models of brain activity using deep transfer learning, as well as investigating contrastive learning for audio applications.

I am also a musician (I play jazz vibraphone and electronic instruments), and engage into transdisciplinary efforts in Art and Science projects.