Jacopo de Berardinis, PhD

Music Information RetrievalKnowledge Engineering

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Liverpool. I am part of the Artificial Intelligence Research Unit in the School of Computer Science & Informatics, and a member of the Neuro-symbolic AI and Knowledge Engineering group.

As generative AI radically reshapes the creative industries, my mission is to develop trustworthy AI that supports and safeguards human creativity, improves our understanding and appreciation of music, and preserves our cultural legacy.

I am the module leader of COMP346 Music Intelligence, coordinate the CASBAH Lab (AI+Music), and co-lead the AI & Music working group of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH).

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the H2020 Polifonia project at King’s College London and the S+T+ARTS MUSAE project at the University of Manchester, where I also received my PhD in Computer Science.

Research

My research ranges from the design of computational methods and systems to represent, analyse and connect music, to engineering knowledge systems that promote access and interoperability of metadata and multimodal resources.

  • Music Information Retrieval

    Machine learning methods that analyse music across audio, scores and metadata, with a focus on structure, emotion and similarity.

  • Responsible Music AI

    Generative systems designed with and for artists, preserving their creative role and recognising their contributions, and new ways to evaluate music generation.

  • Knowledge Engineering

    Multimodal knowledge graphs that connect data scattered across sources, formats and modalities, for knowledge discovery and trustworthy information retrieval.

  • Musical Heritage

    Lowering the barrier for stakeholders to create interlinked collections, so that our musical heritage is easier to preserve, connect and explore.

Read about our ongoing projects on the University of Liverpool’s AI+Music page, and about the DARIAH working group on Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM), which promotes a sustainable and interoperable data infrastructure for music research.

News & Announcements

  1. RAIM Article Accepted

    Our article “RAIM: Operationalising Trustworthy AI in Music Generation” has been accepted in IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, for the special issue on Ethical Innovation with/in Music Technology. It turns the European Commission’s Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI into 45 responsible features for generative music AI, evaluated through a Delphi study with experts from academia, industry and regulatory bodies. Project website

  2. DARIAH AIM Seminar

    On 3–4 September we organised “Connecting the Collections: A Roadmap for Engineering Interoperable Music Linked Data” in Liverpool, the kick-off seminar of the renewed DARIAH working group on Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM).

  3. Deepfake Challenge Results

    For their second coursework in COMP346 Music Intelligence, students trained models to tell human-composed music from AI-generated audio, using a subset of the SONICS dataset from MIREX 2025. Congratulations to everyone who took part! See the leaderboard

  4. ESWC 2026 Award Nomination

    “Competency Questions as Executable Plans: A Controlled RAG Architecture for Cultural Heritage Storytelling”, led by Naga Sowjanya Barla, was nominated for the Best Research Paper and Student Paper award at ESWC 2026. Congratulations, Naga!

  5. Google DeepMind Interns

    In summer 2025, I supervised two Google DeepMind Research Ready (GDMRR) interns, Elliott Watkiss-Leek and Wilf Morlidge, who joined our group to work on knowledge engineering projects.

  6. Job Opportunity

    Join our team as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Computer Science to work on Music Knowledge Graphs in the city of Liverpool. Find out more

  7. New Role

    I joined the University of Liverpool as an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in the School of Informatics and Computer Science (AI Research Unit).

  8. Video Release

    Keynote speaker recordings from the 1st International Workshop on Generative Neuro-Symbolic AI @ ESWC 2024 are now available on our website.

Teaching

In Liverpool, I lead Music Intelligence (COMP346), a new module for third-year Computer Science and Game Design students that explores the unique intersection of AI, Music Information Retrieval and Computational Creativity. Music is the common denominator to explore these technologies, with the aim of equipping the next generation of computer scientists to innovate responsibly within the digital multimedia landscape.

  1. Part 1

    Music Processing & Retrieval

    Audio features, structure analysis and beat tracking, up to deep learning for music classification and retrieval.

  2. Part 2

    Generative Music AI

    Deep generative models, from recurrent networks to Transformers, trained to create new musical material.

  3. Part 3

    Music Intelligent Systems

    Putting it all together to design and build interactive music agents, with a focus on responsible and ethical AI.

Student Projects

I advertise individual and group projects for undergraduate and MSc students, building on the research themes above. Projects can grow into research depending on their outcomes, and continue as a research internship within our group for further development.

Look out for my proposals when projects are advertised, or email me to discuss an idea of your own.

  • COMP390 Honours Year CS Project Individual final-year projects
  • COMP530 MSc Group Project Team projects for MSc students
  • COMP702 MSc Project Individual MSc dissertations

Contact

We welcome applications and expressions of interest for research internships, postgraduate studies and other opportunities within our group. If you are passionate about any of the research topics above, or have a project proposal in mind, get in touch!

jacodb@liverpool.ac.uk