Jules Cauzinille was awarded a 2022 ILCB PhD grant to conduct a project under the supervision of Benoît Favre (LIS), in collaboration with Arnaud Rey (LPC), Thierry Legou (LPL), and Ricard Marxer (Université de Toulon). Jules obtained a bachelor’s degree in computational linguistics and a master’s degree in natural language processing at Université Paris Cité. He has a particular interest in speech and para-linguistics, and on the development of machine learning and computational models for the automatic processing of human communication. He has previously explored the annotation of affective behaviors in political speech and the automatic recognition of vocal expressiveness, under the supervision of Marc Evrard and Albert Rilliard (LISN – CNRS). In his PhD, Jules will further explore non-textual speech processing in both human and primate vocalizations. The aims are to build self-supervised acoustic representation learning models and to conduct a set of probing experiments including data-based vocal synthesis of primate soundscapes.