The Acadèmia d’Excel·lència programme (formerly ICREA Acadèmia), of the Ministry of Research and Universities from the Government of Catalonia, aims to contribute to intensifying the research activity of Catalan university faculty. The awardees receive a research grant over a five-year period.

Xavier Serra receives this grant for the fourth time (previously in 2008, 2013 and 2020). This new grant will allow him to expand and consolidate his research in multimodal AI models integrating audio, musical symbolic representations and text. To this end, he will conduct research to incorporate musicological and sociocultural knowledge into these models to make them more interpretable, inclusive and aligned with the way people understand and experience music.

Besides Xavier Serra, seven other professors from four different departments of Universitat Pompeu Fabra have been selected in the Acadèmia d’Excel·lència 2025.