Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

"AI unplugged": on 3 March Unimore and companies together to take stock of artificial intelligence engineering

A special day of true cooperation between universities and companies, where Artificial Intelligence will be expressed in its acoustic version, Unplugged, precisely: the results of the synergetic relationship between scientific research, business, industry and society can just be presented without any need for amplification, in its most authentic and effective sound. The new degree programme in 'AI Engineering' will also be presented on the day. The event will take place on Friday 3 March at the Tecnopolo in Modena.

The AImageLab laboratory of the "Enzo Ferrari" Department of Engineering, a component of the AI Research and Innovation (AIRI) centre of the High Technology Network of the Emilia Romagna Region, proposes a day of discussion and presentation to the territory of the initiatives underway on Artificial Intelligence and in particular the collaboration with NVIDIA and the new Master's Degree in 'Artificial Intelligence Engineering', in English, which will be activated from the next academic year and is unique in its kind precisely because of its genesis in science-business cooperation.

The programme of the day, which will be held on Friday 3 March at the events room of the Tecnopolo of Modena (Via Vivarelli, 10), after the institutional speeches by the Magnifico Rettore Unimore, Prof. Carlo Adolfo Porro, and the Assessore Regionale alle Politiche Produttive, Mr Vincenzo Colla, includes a full programme of in-depth talks: at 9. 30 Fredric Pariente, NVIDIA's EMEA Director, will talk about the three years since the launch of NVAITC Italy, a programme to enable and accelerate AI research projects in Italy by focusing expertise and resources on specific research projects, and, more generally, about the collaboration between Unimore and NVIDIA.

At 9.50 a.m., during the round table " If AI were a book: artificial intelligence and its narratives ", Prof. Rita Cucchiara and Prof. Franco Zambonelli from Unimore and Eng. Fabio Ferrari, CEO of Ammagamma, will discuss.

At 10.45 a.m., Eng. Stefano Alletto, Senior Computer Vision/Machine Learning Engineer at Apple, will bring his testimony as an alumnus who landed in Silicon Valley and will show how Unimore technologies are now in Apple Labs.

The final session, which will include two technical spotlights on ChatGPT (by Michele Flannino, Principal AI Scientist at Prometeia) and Leonardo labs (by Alessandro Nicolosi, Head of AI Research Area of Leonardo labs), will be preceded by the presentation of the new Master's Degree Programme in 'Artificial Intelligence Engineering'.

For some years now, university training initiatives in the field of artificial intelligence have been opening up in Italy in the Computer Science and Computer Engineering degree class. In such a context, this new Unimore Degree Programme (active from A.Y. 2023/2024) is the first in Italy to focus expressly on Artificial Intelligence Engineering and the design of intelligent computer systems.

The course programme was defined with local companies, with representatives of Confindustria and other industrial associations, and thanks to numerous meetings that have been organised through the AI Academy for the past three years, in order to define the priorities and expectations of national and international companies and thus create an initiative, as the title of the event indicates, of "Artificial Intelligence Engineering, a new course alongside the enterprise”.

The second peculiarity is its structure, completely in English, organised in two curricula: the first will be 'Large Scale AI': it will delve into the Artificial Intelligence initiatives of today and tomorrow, also considering the great challenges of HPC, which finds in Italy, at Cineca, one of its best expressions. Unique nationwide, researchers from NVIDIA will be among the lecturers on the course and it will be possible to have the company's certification directly by attending the Master's degree.

The other curriculum of 'AI applications' was created for the priority applications in our area and, in particular, of robotics and bioinformatics, considering the needs of the manufacturing and healthcare worlds.

A course that looks to the future and also to future interdisciplinary collaborations with the world of physics (with courses in Quantum Computing) and Medicine (with a course in Neuroscience). The aim is to train new AI Engineers, who are currently one of the most sought-after categories of professionals, through a strongly international approach but who, at the same time, can remain in the territory, within the companies that already operate in this sector.

NVIDIA is the world's most famous 'AI Company', which for years has been providing the computing potential of GPUs for all systems developing AI, from HPC centres (such as in Leonardo at CINECA) to embedded systems used in Automotive and Robotics. In Modena, there is a close collaboration with this company thanks to a three-year agreement of the Nvidia AI Technical centre, within the framework of the national AI Nation project, coordinated by CINI, which has made it possible to develop research activities of great international relevance together.

In particular, scientific workshops have been co-organised in Italy, the USA and Israel, and the work carried out between Aimagelab and NVIDIA researchers, together with Cineca's supercomputing resources, has made it possible to develop innovative models for the analysis and generation of images and language, which have been published in the largest international scientific fora. The subject of analysing and recognising people in videos was also made concrete through a collaboration with Nvidia Research and led to the development of new privacy-preserving methodologies for analysing people, which were then applied in the security field (also thanks to regional funding). These technologies called Inter-homines allowed the creation of an academic startup GoatAI and the realisation of several patents together with Unimore.

AImagelab. For more than 20 years, this important laboratory (www.aimagelab.ing.unimore.it) has been involved in cutting-edge scientific research in the field of artificial intelligence, its theoretical disciplines (Artificial Vision, Machine Learning, Intelligent IoT, Cognitive Robotics, Multimedia Processing, Large-scale AI) and its applications in industrial manufacturing, citizen security, up to digital humanities, health and medicine.

AImagelab now employs five Unimore Professors (Rita Cucchiara, Elisa Ficarra, Costantino Grana, Simone Calderara and Roberto Vezzani), seven Researchers (Lorenzo Baraldi, Enver Sangineto, Marcella Cornia, Federico Bolelli, Silvia Cascianelli, Angelo Porrello, Vittorio Cuculo) and more than thirty-five PhD students, research fellows and collaborators in research projects financed by the Modena Foundation, MUR, the Emilia-Romagna Region, European Projects and now the NRRP.

Aimagelab is active in several industrial projects, also thanks to the presence of the AIRI (AI Research and Innovation) centre accredited by the Emilia-Romagna Region and operating in the Clust-ER; in the last three years, important research and innovation projects have been developed with local companies such as Florim, Ferrari, Tetrapak, IMA, YooxNetAPorter, DigitalDesign and DataLogic, to name but a few. Italian companies co-finance research doctorates (such as Leonardo, Prometeia, Ayxon, Ammagamma and Altilia) and there are strong international collaborations such as with Panasonic, Facebook and Toyota, especially within the ELLIS European Network (European Labratory of Learning and Intelligent Systems) of which Modena is one of forty units distributed throughout Europe. In 2023, the Aimagelab Laboratory is active in five European projects, four PNRR projects, two PRIN projects, one European DIH and several industrial projects,

Aimagelab and AIRI are actively collaborating with the initiatives of the Emilia Romagna Region thanks to a grant obtained in 2018 that is leading to the construction of a new building for Artificial Intelligence. In addition, an initiative was launched with companies through the AI Academy (https://www.aiacademy.unimore.it/) of post-graduate company training, which resulted in two successful schools ' Deep Learning ' and ' Artificial Vision ' in the ' Advanced School on AI ' project financed by the Region.

The event is already attracting many participants: more than 70 companies and over 150 student students have registered to take part in this discussion event, which aims to encourage innovation, research and the search for solutions to numerous social challenges.

The day is co-organised by AImagelab Unimore and Ammagamma, with the support of Confindustria Emilia and the co-financing of the Emilia-Romagna Region within the 'Advanced Schools in AI' project.

Participation is free after registering on the site.

https://www.aiacademy.unimore.it/ai-unplugged/

Categorie: International - english