Toward Robust, Responsible and Trustworthy Speech Foundation Models

• Best Student Paper Award at the ISCA Interspeech 2024 for the paper "A Contrastive Learning Approach to Mitigate Bias in Speech Models" (https://youtu.be/Kn4zScqw2ro?si=Kc2u56uO0m07CDMZ) (2024)
• Teaching activities (22-23, 23-24, and 24-25) on: 1) Data Science e Tecnologie Basi di Dati, Master, 8 CFU: EL+TU 24h (22-23), EL 18h (23-24), TU 39h (24-25) 2) Data Science Lab: Process and Methods, Master, 8 CFU: EL+TU 36h (22-23), EL+TU 42h (23-24), TU 21h (24-25) Latest CPD: 3.60/99.23% (DSTBD) and 3.32/94.76% (DSL) (2025)
• Co-organizer of the Speech Pathology Analysis and DEtection (SPADE) Workshop, co-located with the IEEE ICASSP 2025 Conference (https://spadeworkshop.github.io/). (2025)
• Invited Talk at the School of AI Algiers about "Subgroup Performance in End-to-End Speech Models" on the 10th November 2023. (2023)
• Invited Talk at Amazon AGI - Speech Recognition and Understanding Team, on Research Highlights from PhD, 28th March 2025. (2025)
• Participation at the A&T Fair from 14th February to 16th February 2024, volunteering at the stand DAUIN-PoliTO, and poster presentation of the PhD research. (2024)
• Joint Project (04/2024 - 03/2025) with Amazon Alexa AI on "LLM Prompting in Multimodal Time-Evolving Scenarios", Author. Participation in the Amazon-PoliTo Workshop on March 07, 2025, and presentation of project results and ongoing research. (2025)
• Joint Project (03/2022 - 03/2024) with Amazon Alexa AI on "Explaining Model Bias and Behavior for End-to-End SLU Models", Lead Author. Participation in the Amazon-PoliTo Workshops on March 23, 2023, and March 01, 2024, and presentation of project results. (2024)
• PhD's Pitch @ IEEE Polito Student Branch Title: “Subgroup Disparities in Speech Models: Detection and Mitigation” Short Abstract: The research addresses performance disparities in speech models across subgroups through in-processing (divergence-aware regularization, targeted augmentation, contrastive learning) and post-processing (targeted data acquisition) techniques, improving robustness for underrepresented demographics. (2025)
• SmartTalk at SmartData@PoliTO center on PhD research, 11th March 2024 (https://smartdata.polito.it/exploring-subgroup-performance-in-end-to-end-speech-models/). (2024)
• Participation in the Generative Modeling Summer School (GEMSS, https://gemss.ai/2023/) from 26th to 30th June 2023, and poster presentation of the PhD research. (2023)
• Participation in the Speech and Natural Language Processing Winter school in the Alps (ALPS, https://lig-alps.imag.fr/) from 16th to 20th January 2023, and poster presentation of the PhD research. (2023)
• Participation in the Mediterranean Machine Learning school (https://www.m2lschool.org/) from 11th to 16th September 2022. (2022)
• Participation in the Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (https://synapsesymposium.ai/) and poster presentation of the PhD research. (2023)
• Joint Project (04/2025 - ongoing) with Amazon AGI on "SpeechLLMs Preference Modeling", Lead Author and Principal Author of the Proposal. (2025)
• Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon AGI - Speech Recognition Team (2024)
• Online Chair at ECML-PKDD 2023 (2023)
• ISCA Interspeech 2024 Travel Grant Recipient (2024)
• ACM KDD 2024 Travel Grant Recipient (2024)
• IEEE ICASSP 2024 Travel Grant Recipient (2024)
• Italian and Greek Language Ambassador for the AYA Cohere4AI project (01/09/2023 - 31/12/2024) (2024)

Master of Science

• Data Science e Tecnologie per le Basi di Dati. A.A. 2022/23, INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA (COMPUTER ENGINEERING). Collaboratore del corso
• Data Science e Tecnologie per le Basi di Dati. A.A. 2022/23, INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA (COMPUTER ENGINEERING). Collaboratore del corso
• Data Science e Tecnologie per le Basi di Dati. A.A. 2023/24, INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA (COMPUTER ENGINEERING). Collaboratore del corso
• Data Science e Tecnologie per le Basi di Dati. A.A. 2024/25, INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA (COMPUTER ENGINEERING). Collaboratore del corso
• Data Science e Tecnologie per le Basi di Dati. A.A. 2025/26, INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA (COMPUTER ENGINEERING). Collaboratore del corso
• Data Science e Tecnologie per le Basi di Dati. A.A. 2025/26, INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA (COMPUTER ENGINEERING). Collaboratore del corso
• Data science lab: process and methods. A.A. 2022/23, DATA SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING. Collaboratore del corso
• Data science lab: process and methods. A.A. 2023/24, DATA SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING. Collaboratore del corso
• Data science lab: process and methods. A.A. 2024/25, DATA SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING. Collaboratore del corso

• DBDM - Database and Data Mining Group

• Koudounas, Alkis (2026)
  Toward Robust, Responsible and Trustworthy Speech Foundation Models. relatore: BARALIS, ELENA MARIA; PASTOR, ELIANA; , 38. XXXVIII Ciclo, P.: 311
  Doctoral Thesis
• Giobergia, Flavio; Savelli, Claudio; Koudounas, Alkis; Baralis, Elena Maria (2025)
  Quantum feature selection from interpretable models using qubo formulation. In: CLEF 2025, Madrid (ESP), 9 – 12 September 2025
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Benedetto, Irene; Koudounas, Alkis; Vaiani, Lorenzo; Pastor, Eliana; Cagliero, Luca; ... (2025)
  Boosting court judgment prediction and explanation using legal entities. In: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND LAW, vol. 33, pp. 605-640. ISSN 0924-8463
  Contributo su Rivista
• Koudounas, Alkis; Pastor, Eliana; Mazzia, Vittorio; Giollo, Manuel; Gueudre, Thomas; ... (2025)
  Privacy Preserving Data Selection for Bias Mitigation in Speech Models. In: 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, Vienna (AT), 27Jul - 1 Aug 2025, pp. 738-748. ISBN: 979-8-89176-288-6
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Koudounas, Alkis; La Quatra, Moreno; Pastor, Eliana; Marco Siniscalchi, Sabato; Baralis, ... (2025)
  "KAN you hear me?" Exploring Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Spoken Language Understanding. In: Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam (NL), 17-21 August, 2025, pp. 4123-4127
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Koudounas, Alkis; Savelli, Claudio; Giobergia, Flavio; Baralis, Elena (2025)
  "Alexa, can you forget me?" Machine Unlearning Benchmark in Spoken Language Understanding. In: Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam (NL), 17-21 August, 2025, pp. 1768-1772
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Koudounas, Alkis; La Quatra, Moreno; Siniscalchi, Sabato Marco; Baralis, Elena (2025)
  voc2vec: A Foundation Model for Non-Verbal Vocalization. In: 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Hyderabad (IND), 06-11 April 2025, pp. 1-5. ISBN: 979-8-3503-6874-1
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Liu, Qingqing; Ciravegna, Gabriele; Koudounas, Alkis; Cerquitelli, Tania; Baralis, Elena (2025)
  Multimodal Fusion Techniques to Enhance Voice Disorder Diagnoses. In: Workshops of the EDBT/ICDT 2025 Joint Conference, DARLI-AP Workshop, Barcelona (ESP), 25-28 March, 2025. ISSN 1613-0073
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Koudounas, Alkis; Pastor, Eliana; Alfaro, Luca de; Baralis, Elena (2025)
  Mitigating Subgroup Disparities in Speech Models: A Divergence-Aware Dual Strategy. In: IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH, AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING, vol. 33, pp. 883-895. ISSN 2329-9290
  Contributo su Rivista
• La Quatra, Moreno; Koudounas, Alkis; Mario Salerno, Valerio; Marco Siniscalchi, Sabato (2025)
  Exploring Generative Error Correction for Dysarthric Speech Recognition. In: Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam (NL), 17-21 August, 2025, pp. 3284-3288
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Koudounas, Alkis; La Quatra, Moreno; Ciravegna, Gabriele; Fantini, Marco; Crosetti, ... (2025)
  MVP: Multi-source Voice Pathology detection. In: Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam (NL), 17-21 August, 2025, pp. 3548-3552
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Cagliero, Luca; Vaiani, Lorenzo; Pastor, Eliana; Koudounas, Alkis; Baralis, Elena; ... (2025)
  Detecting and Mitigating Challenges in Zero-Shot Video Summarization with Video LLMs. In: 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, Vienna (AT), 27Jul - 1 Aug 2025, pp. 286-301. ISBN: 979-8-89176-256-5
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Savelli, Claudio; Koudounas, Alkis; Giobergia, Flavio (2025)
  MALTO at SemEval-2025 task 3: Detecting hallucinations in LLMs via uncertainty quantification and larger model validation. In: 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), Vienna (AT), July 31 - August 1, 2025, pp. 1318-1324. ISBN: 979-8-89176-273-2
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Koudounas, Alkis; Giobergia, Flavio (2024)
  Houston we have a Divergence: A Subgroup Performance Analysis of ASR Models. In: 49th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops, ICASSPW 2024, Seoul (KOR), 14-19 April 2024, pp. 812-813. ISBN: 979-8-3503-7451-3
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Koudounas, Alkis; Giobergia, Flavio; Pastor, Eliana; Baralis, Elena (2024)
  A Contrastive Learning Approach to Mitigate Bias in Speech Models. In: Interspeech 2024, Kos (GRC), 1-5 September 2024, pp. 827-831
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Koudounas, Alkis; Pastor, Eliana; Baralis, Elena (2024)
  Assessing Speech Model Performance: A Subgroup Perspective. In: SEBD 2024: 32nd Symposium on Advanced Database System, Villasimius, Sardinia (IT), 23-26 June, 2024, pp. 101-111
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Fantini, Marco; Ciravegna, Gabriele; Koudounas, Alkis; Cerquitelli, Tania; Baralis, ... (2024)
  The Rapidly Evolving Scenario of Acoustic Voice Analysis in Otolaryngology. In: CUREUS, vol. 16. ISSN 2168-8184
  Contributo su Rivista
• Koudounas, Alkis; Pastor, Eliana; Attanasio, Giuseppe; Mazzia, Vittorio; Giollo, Manuel; ... (2024)
  Towards Comprehensive Subgroup Performance Analysis in Speech Models. In: IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH, AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING, vol. 32, pp. 1468-1480. ISSN 2329-9290
  Contributo su Rivista
• Koudounas, Alkis; Pastor, Eliana; Attanasio, Giuseppe; de Alfaro, Luca; Baralis, Elena (2024)
  Prioritizing Data Acquisition For End-to-End Speech Model Improvement. In: 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Seoul (KOR), 14-19 April 2024, pp. 7000-7004. ISBN: 979-8-3503-4485-1
  Contributo in Atti di Convegno (Proceeding)
• Koudounas, Alkis; Giobergia, Flavio; Baralis, Elena (2024)
  Ex(o)plain: Subgroup-level analysis of exoplanet atmospheric parameters. In: IEEE ACCESS, vol. 12, pp. 139773-139788. ISSN 2169-3536
  Contributo su Rivista