“Italia. Pensiero, futuro” is a series of events curated by the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute of London, Francesco Bongarrà, and journalist Massimo Sebastiani.
Italy’s vibrancy and diversity are not only reflected in its art, landscapes, and cuisine. Since the post-war period and particularly in recent years, the country’s renowned creativity and dynamism have taken new directions (from research in neurobiology to AI) while also finding ways to revitalise the glories of its more or less recent past (from classical antiquity to political laboratories).
To introduce this perhaps lesser-known Italy to an international audience, ICI London has organised a series of events – a true collection of “gems,” each represented by individuals whose ideas, passion, and research make Italy a key player in thought and innovation.
Each month, a guest will take part in a talk-show-style discussion, reflecting on a word that summarises the essence of their work and responding to questions from Director Francesco Bongarrà, Massimo Sebastiani, and the audience.
The fourth event in the series will welcome Roberto Navigli, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Sapienza University of Rome, where he leads the Sapienza NLP research group. In his talk, Professor Navigli will introduce Minerva LLM, a family of Large Language Models (similar to ChatGPT) trained entirely from scratch in both Italian and English, and released as open source. Following an accessible introduction to large language models, he will share the Sapienza NLP group’s journey as part of the PNRR FAIR (Future AI Research) project. The focus will be on the release of their instruction-tuned model and on the joint effort between Sapienza and the spin-off company Babelscape to create increasingly advanced and powerful versions. The presentation will also explore key themes such as ethical alignment, fact-checking, and the importance of cultural knowledge of Italy.
Thursday, 18 September at 6:30 pm, at ICI London. Book your place HERE
The series is supported by Intesa Sanpaolo and DLA Piper Studio Legale Tributario Associato.
Roberto Navigli is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Sapienza University of Rome, where he leads the Sapienza NLP group. He is the author of over 250 publications and the recipient of two prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grants in multilingual semantics, highlighted among the 15 ERC projects that have transformed science. His work has earned numerous awards, including for BabelNet, a project featured in The Guardian and Time magazine. Professor Navigli heads the Minerva AI LLM project — the first LLM pre-trained entirely in Italian and released as open source — and serves as Scientific Director and co-founder of Babelscape, a successful deep-tech spin-off developing innovative techniques for multilingual text understanding and generation. He is a Fellow of ACL, AAAI, ELLIS, and EurAI, and will serve as General Chair of ACL 2025, the world’s premier conference on Natural Language Processing.