Only a couple of weeks before the beginning of Italian Tech Week. The biggest Italian conference on technology, will be held on September 23rd and 24th.
The event, dedicated to the future and innovation, is in its second edition, will bring together startuppers, venture capital funds and professionals from the international tech scene for two days .
Guests
In addition to the highly famous Elon Musk, John Elkann, the minister for Innovation and Digital Transition Vittorio Colao, the ceo of Plug and Play (one of the largest accelerators in the world) Saeed Amidi, the founder and CEO of Dealroom Yoram Wijngaarde, the CEO of Reply Tatiana Rizzante together with her brother Filippo Rizzante, the former CEO of Wind now head of Engineering Maximo Ibarra and the king of social media Khaby Lame, who a few weeks ago became the second most followed Tik Tok account in the world, shortly followed by the queen of porno herself, Mia Khalifa.
ITW is an invitation-only annual conference that brings together some of the most compelling companies and the nation’s leading investors and analysts. The three-day event bridges the gap between product design and development and brings together 25 speakers from companies such as Twitter, Shopify, Visa and Stripe to share their ideas, stories and knowledge. Last year, more than 80 companies participated from a range of industries, including technology, business services, consumers, digital media, clean technologies, life sciences, internet, financial services and wellness.
Speakers
The list of confirmed speakers, constantly updated, also includes Claudio Descalzi CEO of Eni, Gianluca Dettori founder and president of Primo Ventures and VC Hub, Lucia Chierchia Managing Partner of Gellify, Rachel Delacour CEO of Sweep and co-president of France Digitale (the main organization of startups in Europe), Alberto Onetti President of Mind the Bridge, Claudia Pingue Head of the Cdp Technology Transfer Fund.
Francesca Fiore member of the board of Monte Titoli and Distruptech EU, Martin Olczyk Managing Director of Techstars, Giovanni Luperti, CEO and co-founder of Humaans, Davide Dattoli ceo and founder of Talent Garden, Giorgio Tinacci founder and ceo of Casavo, Alessio Lorusso founder and ceo of Roboze, Carlo Gualandri founder and ceo of Soldo, Alberto Dalmasso founder and ceo of Satispay.
Ferdinando Randisi founder and cto of FabricNano, Giorgio Metta Scientific Director of the Italian Institute of Technology, Ersilia Vaudo Chief Diversity Officer of Esa, Pietro Grassano Business Solutions Director Europe of Algorand, Pietro Lanza President of Intesa Ibm, Paolo Barbato CEO and co-founder of Wiseair, Chiara Luzzana Sound Designer, Giuseppe Scionti founder and CEO of Novameat.
By invitation only
The conference will be accessible by invitation only. It will be mainly reserved to an audience of industry professionals. All the contents of the Italian Tech Week will be broadcast by live-streaming on the websites of La Republica, La Stampa and Live Now. In the next days, several tickets to the event will be up for grabs, through a giveaway on social profiles and a quiz, organized in partnership with the startup Wibo.
The exhibition
During the two days of the event, ITW will also host in the inner courtyard of the Ogr an exhibition of applications and technological solutions to see and try, such as virtual reality systems, augmented reality and robotics, sport-tech, etc..
Among the exhibitors: Reply, Lenovo, Annunci69, Eni, Challenger and Scribit by Carlo Ratti Associati, with an exhibition of arttech. Admission will be from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
ITW is organized with the support of the media company Gedi and its new content hub on technology Italian.Tech. The event is supported by Fondazione Crt, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and is sponsored by Reply, Lenovo, Eni, GoBeyond, Stellantis, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, Angel Company, Helbiz, Accenture. It will count with the patronage of the Chamber of Commerce of Turin, the City of Turin, the Piedmont Region and the Italian Space Agency.
Sardinian start-up to fight Alzheimer’s
A worthy contender, entrepreneur Elon Musk and his Neuralink definitely aren’t alone developing the tools that could bring solutions to our health predicaments. Corticale, the start-up, was founded to connect the human brain to a computer assisted by electronics. A great addition for neurodegenerative disease researchers, who will gladly welcome a new startup into the group. The scientific director Gian Nicola Angotzi believes that Corticale will produce microchips implantable in the brain to understand and treat diseases such as Parkinson’s, epilepsy or Alzheimer’s.
Moreover, this technology is also applicable to control, directly from the brain, robotic prostheses, exoskeletons and other devices. From the research of the Microtechnology for Neuroelectronics team of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), led by Luca Berdondini the scientists behind Corticale was born in Oristano. An Italian answer to Neuralink by Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla stars along a devoted scientist to the biomedical field, arming himself with a highly competitive hardware.
The company, which opened its headquarters in Genoa, started its activity thanks to the funding of 2 million euros by Giuseppe Santella. The entrepreneur and top manager, with thirty years of experience in numerous companies such as Mindgeek the company behind sites such as xvideos, will join the start-up as co-founder and president. Corticale’s first objective will be to bring to market the SiNAPS (Simultaneous Neural Recording Active Pixel Sensor technology) providing new opportunities for the study of brain functioning with applications in the diagnostic, therapeutic and pharmacological fields.
Competing against Musk’s Neuralink
“We compared Musk’s company with Corticale, verifying how the neural interfaces developed in IIT were not only state of the art but even gave the possibility of being able to listen to the brain in a much more refined way than Neuralink itself does today,” Angotzi explains.
“In recent years – he says – research in the field of neural interfaces has received a lot of attention, even from the media, just think of Neuralink, the company founded by Elon Musk that is working in that direction, even if sometimes with different objectives from ours. Corticale in fact will focus exclusively on clinical applications of these tools in order to improve the lives of millions of patients suffering from diseases related to the nervous system”. The researcher at IIT and technological director of Corticale says.
The technology developed by IIT labs and now brought to market by Corticale (SiNAPS) allows for the creation of implantable devices equipped with thousands of neural sensors the size of a hair. Each device allows the bioelectrical activity of an incredibly large number of neurons in different brain circuits to be recorded (“listened to”).
The stream of brain data captured by these ultra-high resolution devices will be able to be acquired and analyzed and will offer entirely new access to study the principles of brain function and pathology. There could be new opportunities for the development of bio-electronic medical devices for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It will also enable the creation of next-generation human-machine neural interfaces to control electronic or robotic devices, such as lower or upper limb prostheses or exoskeletons.
