Eklavya Sarkar

Eklavya is a postdoctoral researcher at Earth Species Project, working in the Foundation Models team. His research focuses on robust bioacoustics representation learning, including multi-species encoding and JEPA-like architectures. His passion for AI led him to pursue a PhD in Machine Learning at EPFL, Switzerland, as part of the Swiss National Science Foundation’s ‘NCCR Evolving Language’ project. His doctoral research at Idiap Research Insitute investigated self-supervised neural representations learnt from human speech and their transferability for decoding non-human animal vocalizations. He holds a Master’s degree in Data Science from the University of Bath, UK, where he worked at the intersection of computer vision and biometrics on topics such as face recognition, face morphing, and deepfakes. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Liverpool and has worked at CERN in Geneva. In his free time, you can find him attending Bachata dance festivals, skiing in the Swiss Alps, writing about football or video games, hosting parties, or vibe-coding.