Good evening. I cannot see you but I really thank you for being with us today and tonight. And a special thank you goes to Bill Dally who has done us the honor of being here. And welcome to the first annual lecture magistrale of the Compagnia di San Paolo Institute for Advanced Study, which has been created within the Italian Institute of Artificial Intelligence AI for Industry and which is hosted at our home here at the OGR.
The Institute for Advanced Study aims to connect the frontier of scientific research with the transformations which are reshaping industry and society in the age of AI. And the institute aims to serve as a scientific hub, as an interconnector designed to combine vision and flow. Scientists, engineers, scholars come here to collaborate, challenge and inspire.
A few words before giving the floor to our friends and to some of the key actors of our journey, about the institute, about the Italian Institute of Artificial Intelligence AI for Industry. The institute was founded in June 2024. Since our foundation one year ago, under the coordination of our director Antonio Caligari who is sitting there, and of our administrative director Marco Monga, we have started to build an integrated multi-divisional ecosystem with, I think, some speed and hopefully with purpose.
The Italian Institute of Artificial Intelligence has been established by the government of Italy to pursue application-oriented research in AI-related fields with real-world industrial impact. At the heart of the institute are our research labs, our research and development labs. And I'm particularly happy, and they are sitting here today with us, to share with you the first results of our activity, especially with reference to the attraction of talented people working and leading our labs here in Turin, because an outstanding first cohort of young talented scientists are chosen to move here from prestigious universities, research centers and companies in the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland.
And while a new round of selection is moving ahead, the first five labs have been launched with focus areas which include robust and intelligent autonomous systems, AI for advanced materials, physical holistic intelligence and digital twins, scalable AI, and AI security.
Powering this science is our foundry, which is our high-performance computing and model building factory. And on this I must tell you that we won the first European project in collaboration with CINECA, and we are part of the Italian AI factory hosted and coordinated nationally by CINECA, which is integrated within the European AI Factory's initiatives to scale AI infrastructure and services across the EU.
Together with CINECA, we are currently coordinating the preparation of the Italian proposal for the gigafactory of AI, which is a fundamental challenge involving technological leaders of the country. So also the companies reshaping the future of intelligence and artificial intelligence. And to better reach the system of small and medium enterprises, the institute has decided to act also as a sourcing and matchmaking platform. So not only to have our own research labs but also to act as a catalytic actor in order to promote the matching between supply and demand of artificial intelligence solutions in a country which is characterized by a significant number of relatively small and highly specialized companies on both sides, on both the supply and the demand side.
Like a true marketplace. Our SOUK, and the acronym stands for System for User Knowledge. But I think you can see what it stands for in terms of the analogy and the metaphor that we want to use, which is connecting specialized technology producers with end users in industry. And thanks to Alessandro De Florentes who has made it possible, and especially want to thank you for the work you will do to make it a success story.
And then we are growing a start garden in collaboration with partners such as Zest and CDP Venture Capital. And I think I will stop here on that. I want to move to express a few thank yous, and I hope not to be boring. And I think I will not because there is substance underlying these considerations.
First, we want to thank the government of Italy which has established AI for Industry and which is following our work with commitment, expectations and skills at all levels. Second, I want to thank the city and the region. So, Mayor Stefano Lo Russo and President Alberto Cirio for supporting our mission which is to make or to contribute to make Turin, Piedmont and Italy as a magnet for talent in key cross-cutting technological clusters.
And then I want to thank my friends and colleagues, the members of the board of directors, Duelio Palini, Paolino, Andrea Bertoini, Giovanni Anastasi, Alberto Tolentino for their generosity, competence and vision, our board of auditors and our scientific advisory board for the guidance that they're giving us. It is a pleasure here to have today with us Marco Pavone, Stanford University and NVIDIA, who is acting as the chair of our scientific committee, and also Riccardo Zecchina from Bocconi University is with us this evening.
Then I want to thank the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia because the institute has been our institutional partner since the start and it has helped us to set up our corporate systems and is now working with us on areas of common interest in robotics and material sciences. So my thanks go to President Gabrielli, Scientific Director Giorgio Metta, and the Director General Fabio.
Our hosts here at OGR, President and CEO David Deves and Director Marbula. I really want to thank them and you know I should not even tell you why. It is sufficient for you to look around and to see why. I really thank you because I think that this became our house and thank you for that. And it is also our own responsibility to get the institute growing and fulfilling the expectations that this responsibility implies.
OGR has become our home. And it is important to observe, I was discussing it briefly with Elsa Fornero one minute ago, that the former rail workshops of earlier industrial revolutions now serve as the house of an institute that, to echo a well-known line from Jensen Huang, must contribute to a new industrial revolution powered by GPUs. So this is a symbolic event and it's important that the location can reflect it.
I'm going to now add a fundamental point because we could never have been here without the vision and the support by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and by the President of CDP, who has, I will say, had the vision to have the institute here and to support not only this location but also the future evolution of the institute also in collaboration with the Politecnico. But I will leave it to my friend and colleague, Director of Politecnico di Torino, the industrial community in Turin and around us, Guido Saracco. But I also want to mention our friend Elisa in Milan and this is a fundamental engine of transformation for us because it is giving us impulse to promote research which is oriented towards application.
We are setting up a joint lab with Leonardo and this is important for us in software life cycle and in human-machine interactions, also in dual technologies. And I want to thank Roberto Cingolani, Simonetta Iarussi, Greta and Carlo Cavattoni and the entire team for their support. It has been quite important.
Finally, a special thanks today goes to Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo. Thank you, President Marco Gilli and Secretary General Burton Fossi for your vision and for believing in both AI for Industry and the Institute for Advanced Study from the start. It is thanks to your commitment that we are here this evening.
Finally, I want to thank the team of the institute and also, focusing now especially on the institute, you have done and you are doing a great job and this standard of performance is an important precondition and starting point to keep improving and growing.
Then Marco Pavone will introduce extensively our guests. I can only mention the fact that the topic tonight that Bill Dally has selected is exactly where we should begin. Meaning that the story of AI's current capabilities is in large part a story of engineering, new number representations that preserve learning while improving efficiency, specialized instructions and engines for dense linear algebra, sparsity techniques to exploit and so on and so forth. And he has been at the frontier of research in this area and not only research but also technology.
I want to tell you that this lezione inaugurates a tradition. So we will have a regular rendezvous between frontier knowledge and industrial impact in a setting which is the one that you are observing tonight. And I want now to give the floor to Marco Pavone with a special thanks to Marco because I strongly believe that talent attracts talent and students, researchers, entrepreneurs converge when they see talent. And Marco has been working with us since day one with his own effort, reputation and devotion to what he's doing. So I really want to thank you and we also know that reward to talent is the primary engine of economic growth and we look forward to have our own responsibility measured in terms of our capability to give opportunities to the young and so to those who will come after us. So thank you Marco and the floor is yours.
