Dr. Giovanni Di Liberto

Assistant Professor, Computer Science

Assistant Professor, Trinity Inst. of Neurosciences (TCIN)

gdiliber@tcd.ie 3531896 1261 https://diliberg.net

Biography

Giovanni is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, at Trinity College Dublin. He is also affiliated with the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN) and the ADAPT Centre. Using computational methods grounded in Computer Science and Engineering, Giovanni's team investigates how the human brain processes speech and music, impacting a range of research domains, from the study of early brain development to hearing impairment. Giovanni's supervises a multidisciplinary team including six PhD students (+1 co-supervised student), one postdoctoral researcher, and eight Master's students.

Giovanni received his Bachelor's degree in Information Engineering in 2011 and his Master's degree in Computer Engineering in 2013, both from the University of Padova, Italy. After a period working on his thesis at University College Cork (UCC, Ireland), he joined Edmund Lalor's research lab in Trinity College Dublin where he pursued a PhD in auditory neuroscience in the School of Electronic & Electrical Engineering. He received his PhD in 2017 and he joined the Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs at École Normale Superieure (Paris) immediately after, under the supervision of Alain de Cheveigné and Shihab Shamma. He holds the title of Assistant Professor in Intelligent Systems in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin.

Giovanni's scientific interests centre on understanding the brain mechanisms underlying speech comprehension. In his work, he develops data analysis methods and applies them to brain data to identify the neural processes responsible for the transformation of a sensory stimulus into its abstract meaning. Brain electrical data is measured with either non-invasive (e.g., electroencephalography) or invasive (e.g., electrocorticography, ECoG) technologies. The first aspect of his research is methodological and has produced novel experimental and analysis frameworks to investigate cortical auditory processing. The second aspect of his research is to use such novel methods to test theories on auditory perception, such as the hierarchical processing of speech and predictive processing theories (e.g. predictive coding). Finally, the third part of his work is translational and involves the identification of solutions to utilise his novel methods in applied settings, for example as tools to develop brain-computer interfaces (COCOHA project) or as objective measures for the monitoring of language development and healthy ageing.

Publications and Further Research Outputs

Peer-Reviewed Publications
Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications

Di Liberto GM, O'Sullivan JA, Lalor EC, Low-Frequency Cortical Entrainment to Speech Reflects Phoneme-Level Processing., Current biology : CB, 25, (19), 2015, p2457-65Journal Article, 2015, DOI
Di Liberto, G.M. and Lalor, E.C. and Millman, R.E., Causal cortical dynamics of a predictive enhancement of speech intelligibility, NeuroImage, 166, 2018, p247-258Journal Article, 2018, DOI , URL
Di Liberto, G.M. and Lalor, E.C., Indexing cortical entrainment to natural speech at the phonemic level: Methodological considerations for applied research, Hearing Research, 348, 2017, p70-77Journal Article, 2017, DOI , URL
O'Sullivan, A.E. and Crosse, M.J. and Di Liberto, G.M. and Lalor, E.C., Visual cortical entrainment to motion and categorical speech features during silent lipreading, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10, (679), 2017Journal Article, 2017, DOI , URL , TARA - Full Text
Hasegawa-Johnson, M.A. and Jyothi, P. and McCloy, D. and Mirbagheri, M. and Liberto, G.M.D. and Das, A. and Ekin, B. and Liu, C. and Manohar, V. and Tang, H. and Lalor, E.C. and Chen, N.F. and Hager, P. and Kekona, T. and Sloan, R. and Lee, A.K.C., ASR for under-resourced languages from probabilistic transcription, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing, 25, (1), 2017, p46-59Journal Article, 2017, DOI , URL
Crosse, M.J. and Di Liberto, G.M. and Bednar, A. and Lalor, E.C., The multivariate temporal response function (mTRF) toolbox: A MATLAB toolbox for relating neural signals to continuous stimuli, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10, (NOV2016), 2016Journal Article, 2016, DOI , URL
Crosse, M.J. and Di Liberto, G.M. and Lalor, E.C., Eye can hear clearly now: Inverse effectiveness in natural audiovisual speech processing relies on long-term crossmodal temporal integration, Journal of Neuroscience, 36, (38), 2016, p9888-9895Journal Article, 2016, DOI , URL
Di Liberto, G.M. and Lalor, E.C., Isolating neural indices of continuous speech processing at the phonetic level, Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, 894, 2016, p337-345Journal Article, 2016, DOI , URL
Kalashnikova, M. and Peter, V. and Di Liberto, G.M. and Lalor, E.C. and Burnham, D., Infant-directed speech facilitates seven-month-old infantsâ cortical tracking of speech, Scientific Reports, 8, (1), 2018Journal Article, 2018, DOI , URL
Di Liberto, G.M. and Peter, V. and Kalashnikova, M. and Goswami, U. and Burnham, D. and Lalor, E.C., Atypical cortical entrainment to speech in the right hemisphere underpins phonemic deficits in dyslexia, NeuroImage, 175, 2018, p70-79Journal Article, 2018, DOI , URL
de CheveignÃ©, A. and Wong, D.E. and Di Liberto, G.M. and HjortkjÃŠr, J. and Slaney, M. and Lalor, E., Decoding the auditory brain with canonical component analysis, NeuroImage, 172, 2018, p206-216Journal Article, 2018, DOI , URL
Broderick, M.P. and Anderson, A.J. and Di Liberto, G.M. and Crosse, M.J. and Lalor, E.C., Electrophysiological Correlates of Semantic Dissimilarity Reflect the Comprehension of Natural, Narrative Speech, Current Biology, 28, (5), 2018, p803-809.e3Journal Article, 2018, DOI , URL
Di Liberto, G.M. and Crosse, M.J. and Lalor, E.C., Cortical measures of phoneme-level speech encoding correlate with the perceived clarity of natural speech, eNeuro, 5, (2), 2018Journal Article, 2018, DOI , URL
Aisling E. O"Sullivan, Michael J. Crosse, Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Alain de Cheveigné, Edmund C. Lalor, Neurophysiological indices of audiovisual speech integration are enhanced at the phonetic level for speech in noise, 2020Journal Article, 2020
Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Michael J. Crosse, Edmund C. Lalor, Cortical Measures of Phoneme-Level Speech Encoding Correlate with the Perceived Clarity of Natural Speech, eneuro, 2018, pENEURO.0084--18.2018Journal Article, 2018, DOI
Broderick, M.P., Di Liberto, G.M., Anderson, A.J., Rofes, A., Lalor, E.C., Dissociable electrophysiological measures of natural language processing reveal differences in speech comprehension strategy in healthy ageing, Scientific Reports, 11, (1), 2021Journal Article, 2021, DOI
O'Sullivan, A.E., Crosse, M.J., Di Liberto, G.M., de Cheveigné, A., Lalor, E.C., Neurophysiological indices of audiovisual speech processing reveal a hierarchy of multisensory integration effects, Journal of Neuroscience, 41, (23), 2021, p4991-5003Journal Article, 2021, DOI
Di Liberto, G.M., Pelofi, C., Bianco, R., Patel, P., Mehta, A.D., Herrero, J.L., de Cheveigné, A., Shamma, S., Mesgarani, N., Cortical encoding of melodic expectations in human temporal cortex, eLife, 9, 2020Journal Article, 2020
Di Liberto, G.M., Pelofi, C., Shamma, S., de Cheveigné, A., Musical expertise enhances the cortical tracking of the acoustic envelope during naturalistic music listening, Acoustical Science and Technology, 41, (1), 2020, p361-364Journal Article, 2020
Di Liberto, G.M., Wong, D., Melnik, G.A., de Cheveigné, A., Low-frequency cortical responses to natural speech reflect probabilistic phonotactics, NeuroImage, 196, 2019, p237-247Journal Article, 2019
de Cheveigné, A., Di Liberto, G.M., Arzounian, D., Wong, D.D.E., Hjortkjær, J., Fuglsang, S., Parra, L.C., Multiway canonical correlation analysis of brain data, NeuroImage, 186, 2019, p728-740Journal Article, 2019
Di Liberto, G., Kadioglu, S., Leo, K., Malitsky, Y., DASH: Dynamic approach for switching heuristics, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 9892 LNCS, 2016, p886Journal Article, 2016
Di Liberto GM, Nie J, Yeaton J, Khalighinejad B, Shamma SA, Mesgarani N., Neural representation of linguistic feature hierarchy reflects second-language proficiency., NeuroImage, 227, 2021, p117586Journal Article, 2021, DOI
Di Liberto, G.M., Wong, D., Melnik, G.A., de Cheveigné, A., Cortical responses to natural speech reflect probabilistic phonotactics, bioRxiv, 2018Journal Article, 2018, DOI
Giovanni M. Di Liberto and Michele Barsotti and Giovanni Vecchiato and Jonas Ambeck-Madsen and Maria Del Vecchio and Pietro Avanzini and Luca Ascari, Robust anticipation of continuous steering actions from electroencephalographic data during simulated driving, Scientific Reports, 11, (1), 2021Journal Article, 2021, DOI
Guilhem Marion and Giovanni M. Di Liberto and Shihab A. Shamma, The Music of Silence. Part I: Responses to Musical Imagery Encode Melodic Expectations and Acoustics, The Journal of Neuroscience, 2021, pJN--RM--0183--21Journal Article, 2021, DOI
Giovanni M. Di Liberto and Guilhem Marion and Shihab A. Shamma, The music of silence. Part II: Music Listening Induces Imagery Responses, The Journal of Neuroscience, 2021, pJN--RM--0184--21Journal Article, 2021, DOI
Giovanni Di Liberto, Accurate Decoding of Imagined and Heard Melodies, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 15, 2021Journal Article, 2021, DOI
Jonas Ambeck-Madsen, Andrea Bellotti, Giovanni M Di Liberto, Luca Ascari, Alessia Colucciello, 'Computer-implemented method, data-processing device, non-invasive brain-computer interface system and non-transitory computer readable medium', US Patent Office, US20210365115A1, 2021Patent, 2021, URL
Carta S, Mangiacotti AMA, Valdes AL, Reilly RB, Franco F, Di Liberto GM., The impact of temporal synchronisation imprecision on TRF analyses., Journal of neuroscience methods, 385, 2023, p109765Journal Article, 2023, DOI
Jessica Tan SH, Kalashnikova M, Di Liberto GM, Crosse MJ, Burnham D., Seeing a talking face matters: The relationship between cortical tracking of continuous auditory-visual speech and gaze behaviour in infants, children and adults., NeuroImage, 256, 2022, p119217Journal Article, 2022, DOI
Attaheri A, Panayiotou D, Phillips A, Ní Choisdealbha Á, Di Liberto GM, Rocha S, Brusini P, Mead N, Flanagan S, Olawole-Scott H, Goswami U., Cortical Tracking of Sung Speech in Adults vs Infants: A Developmental Analysis., Frontiers in neuroscience, 16, 2022, p842447Journal Article, 2022, DOI
Klimovich-Gray Anastasi, Di Liberto Giovann, Amoruso Luci, Barrena Ande, Agirre Enek, Molinaro Nicol, Increased top-down semantic processing in natural speech linked to better reading in dyslexia, NeuroImage, 273, 2023, p120072-Journal Article, 2023, DOI , URL
Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Adam Attaheri, Giorgia Cantisani, Richard B. Reilly, Áine Ní Choisdealbha, Sinead Rocha, Perrine Brusini & Usha Goswami, Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life, Nature Communications, (14), 2023Journal Article, 2023, DOI , URL
PeÃ±a, P.R. and Doyle, P.R. and Ip, E.Y. and Di Liberto, G. and Higgins, D. and McDonnell, R. and Branigan, H. and Gustafson, J. and McMillan, D. and Moore, R.J. and Cowan, B.R., A Special Interest Group on Developing Theories of Language Use in Interaction with Conversational User Interfaces, (509), 2023Conference Paper, 2023, DOI , URL
HjortkjÃŠr, Jens and Wong, Daniel D.E. and Catania, Alessandro and MÃ€rcher-RÃžrsted, Jonatan and Ceolini, Enea and Fuglsang, SÃžren and Kiselev, Ilya and Liberto, Giovanni Di and Liu, Shih-Chii and Dau, Torsten and Slaney, Malcolm and de CheveignÃ©, Alain, Real-time control of a hearing instrument with EEG-based attention decoding, 2024, -Miscellaneous, 2024, DOI , URL
Di Liberto, Giovanni M and Marion, Guilhem and Shamma, Shihab A, The Music of Silence: Part II: Music Listening Induces Imagery Responses, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 41, (35), 2021, p7449â"7460Journal Article, 2021, DOI , URL
Keshavarzi, Mahmoud and Di Liberto, Giovanni M and Gabrielczyk, Fiona and Wilson, Angela and Macfarlane, Annabel and Goswami, Usha, Atypical speech production of multisyllabic words and phrases by children with developmental dyslexia, Developmental science, 27, (1), 2024, pe13428Journal Article, 2024, DOI , URL
Tan, Sok Hui Jessica and Kalashnikova, Marina and Di Liberto, Giovanni M and Crosse, Michael J and Burnham, Denis, Seeing a Talking Face Matters: Gaze Behavior and the Auditory-Visual Speech Benefit in Adults' Cortical Tracking of Infant-directed Speech, Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 35, (11), 2023, p1741â"1759Journal Article, 2023, DOI , URL
Giovanni M Di Liberto, Aaron Nidiffer, Michael J Crosse, Nathaniel J Zuk, Stephanie Haro, Giorgia Cantisani, Martin M Winchester, Aoife Igoe, Ross McCrann, Satwik Chandra, Edmund C Lalor, Giacomo Baruzzo, A standardised open science framework for sharing and re-analysing neural data acquired to continuous stimuli, Neurons, Behavior, Data Analysis, and Theory, (October, 1"25), 2024Journal Article, 2024, DOI
Sara Carta, Emina Alickovic, Johannes Zaar, Alejandro López Valdés, Giovanni M Di Liberto, Cortical encoding of phonetic onsets of both attended and ignored speech in hearing impaired individuals, PLoS One, 19, (11), 2024, pe0308554Journal Article, 2024, DOI
Amirhossein Chalehchaleh, Martin M Winchester, Giovanni M Di Liberto, Robust assessment of the cortical encoding of word-level expectations using the temporal response function, Journal of Neural Engineering, 22, (1), 2025Journal Article, 2025, DOI
Guilhem Marion, Fei Gao, Benjamin P Gold, Giovanni M Di Liberto, Shihab Shamma, IDyOMpy: A new Python-based model for the statistical analysis of musical expectations, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 415, 2025, p110347Journal Article, 2025, DOI
Valdes AL, French C, Hannah J, Di Liberto GM, Attenuation in the neural tracking of auditory streams within the first 20 seconds of sound presentation., 47th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2025Conference Paper, 2025, DOI
Sara Carta, Emina Alickovic, Johannes Zaar, Alejandro Lopez Valdes, Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Competing speech streams are simultaneously represented in the human cortex during attention switching, PLoS Biology, 2026Journal Article, 2026, DOI , URL
Martin Winchester, Kevin Reynolds, Charbel Nebo, Ian Scott, Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Where is the melody? Spontaneous attention orchestrates melody formation during polyphonic music listening, eLife, 2025Journal Article, 2025, DOI
Giorgio Piazza, Sara Carta, Emily Y.J. Ip, Jose Pérez"Navarro, Marina Kalashnikova, Clara D. Martin, Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Are you talking to me? How the choice of speech register impacts listeners" hierarchical encoding of speech, Imaging Neuroscience, 3, 2025Journal Article, 2025, DOI
Lyla Parvez, Mahmoud Keshavarzi, Susan Richards, Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Usha Goswami, Imitation of Multisyllabic Items by Children With Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence for Word-Level Atypical Speech Envelope and Pitch Contours, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 67, (11), 2024, p4288 - 4303, p4288-4303Journal Article, 2024, DOI
João Araújo, Benjamin D. Simons, Varghese Peter, Kanad Mandke, Marina Kalashnikova, Annabel Macfarlane, Fiona Gabrielczyk, Angela Wilson, Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Denis Burnham, Usha Goswami, Atypical low-frequency cortical encoding of speech identifies children with developmental dyslexia, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 18, 2024, p1403677 - 1403677, p1403677-1403677Journal Article, 2024, DOI
Usha Goswami, Lyla Parvez, Mahmoud Keshavarzi, Susan Richards, Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Atypical speech production of multisyllabic items by children with developmental language disorder (DLD) indicate prosodic difficulties, 2024Journal Article, 2024, DOI
Giorgia Cantisani, Amirhossein Chalehchaleh, Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Shihab Shamma, Investigating the cortical tracking of speech and music with sung speech, 2023, p5157 - 5161, p5157-5161Journal Article, 2023, DOI
Michael J. Crosse, Nathaniel J. Zuk, Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Aaron Nidiffer, Sophie Molholm, Edmund C. Lalor, Linear Modeling of Neurophysiological Responses to Speech and Other Continuous Stimuli: Methodological Considerations for Applied Research, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 15, 2021, p705621 - 705621, p705621-705621Review Article, 2021, DOI
Di Liberto GM, Ip EYJ., Speech Neurophysiology in Realistic Contexts: Big Hype or Big Leap?, The European journal of neuroscience, 63, (12), 2026, pe70496Journal Article, 2026
" Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Amirhossein Chalehchaleh, Bonnie Lau, 'Apparatus and Method for Improving Auditory Perception', US Patent, 2025, 2 July 2026Patent, 2025

Attaheri, A., Choisdealbha, Á.N., Di Liberto, G.M., Rocha, S., Brusini, P., Mead, N., Olawole-Scott, H., Boutris, P., Gibbon, S., Williams, I., Grey, C., Flanagan, S., Goswami, U., Delta- And theta-band cortical tracking and phase-amplitude coupling to sung speech by infants, bioRxiv, 2020Journal Article, DOI
Wong, D.D.E., Di Liberto, G.M., de Cheveigné, A., Accurate Modeling of Brain Responses to Speech, bioRxiv, 2018Journal Article

Research Expertise

Keywords

Theory of computation, Psychology and cognitive sciences, Other engineering and technologies, Artificial intelligence and machine learning, Neurosciences,

Recognition

ADAPT Centre award - Best researcher of the year 2023
Special commendation - IRC Best young research of the year award 2022 2022
Best oral presentation award, 1st prize - Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute, Winter Symposium 2015
Best poster presentation award - Young Neuroscientists Symposium, Dublin. 2014
Best oral presentation award, 3rd prize - Cognitive Science Arena, Brixen (Italy) 2016
Luciano Iglesias foundation award for graduate students in computer engineering 2013

Member of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology current
Member of ALBA network (The ALBA Declaration on Equity and Inclusion is a resource for concrete, positive, evidence-based actions that individuals and organizations at any level can take to promote equity and inclusivity) current

Guest editor in Frontiers in Neuroscience
Co-ordinator of the Open Science initiative Cognition and Natural Sensory Processing (CNSP). Workshop and hackathon organiser, definition of standardisation protocols
Associate Editor for IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine
Reviewer for the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference 2019