The eleventh edition of the AI Congress focused today on how the combination of artificial intelligence and other technological domains is driving hybrid computing that will further increase the impact of AI and, together with automation, will redefine economic and social sectors, opening the door to new opportunities for companies and society as a whole.
The first day of the congress addressed this trend and highlighted that the emergence of autonomous agent systems will revolutionize automation at all levels. It also emphasized advances in distributed AI, artificial intelligence as the foundation of assistive and collaborative robotics, and new computational architectures based on neurocomputing, while also addressing key aspects such as sovereignty, efficiency and sustainability in AI.
In her address, robotics expert and head of the Robotic Perception and Manipulation Group at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (CSIC-UPC), Carme Torras—who received the AI Congress award for scientific and professional excellence—explained the central role of artificial intelligence in assistive robotics.
According to Torras, the combination of these two disciplines is “accelerating advances in healthcare and care services and has enormous potential to contribute to social well-being, provided it is deployed in an ethically responsible manner.”
From her perspective, “the co-design of this deployment with all the stakeholders involved—from public administrations, entrepreneurs and researchers to healthcare professionals and patient associations—can position Catalonia as a pioneer in the application of technology in health and social services, given the excellent level of research achieved.”
The AI Congress, which is being held today and tomorrow at the L’illa Auditorium in Barcelona with more than 1,900 registered attendees, brings together over fifty expert voices in artificial intelligence to address the progress and multi-sectoral impact of this technology, as well as the challenges and trends for the coming years.
The Secretary for Digital Policies of the Government of Catalonia, Maria Galindo, presided over the institutional session of the congress and presented the award to Carme Torras. In her speech, Secretary Galindo stressed the need to not lose sight of sustainability and social impact in AI development. “The geopolitical and technological context poses global challenges that Catalonia can and must address through a firm commitment to the development and responsible use of advanced digital technologies such as AI. Ethics must be our banner,” she stated. Galindo also highlighted that “we must collaborate to promote business projects that make us competitive while at the same time contributing to European technological sovereignty.”
According to the director of CIDAI and Scientific Director of Eurecat’s Digital Area, Joan Mas, the eleventh edition of the AI Congress “could not ignore the new geopolitical situation we are immersed in, where we have seen major business movements aimed at leading the global evolution of artificial intelligence, as well as a new positioning at the European level to seek greater technological sovereignty across the board.” For this reason, he added, “we wanted to learn about visions and listen to ideas from leading global companies on these issues.”
For his part, the President of Eurecat, Daniel Altimiras, highlighted the “central role of the technology centre in digital innovation in Catalonia” and underlined the impact generated in the field of AI, noting that since its creation in 2015, Eurecat “has carried out around 500 projects and services related to this discipline, more than half of them with Catalan SMEs, covering virtually all technological branches of artificial intelligence.”
Albert Esplugues, Global Analyst Relations Lead for Generative AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), addressed some of the key trends in the sector in his presentation, such as AI agents, multimodal AI and hybrid computing models, analyzing their current state and their impact on business, society and everyday life.
The keynote speaker of the congress, Rod Evans, Vice President of Supercomputing at NVIDIA, reflected on the concept of sovereign AI—a term that refers to a nation’s ability to develop, deploy and govern artificial intelligence systems in accordance with its own laws, ethical standards and strategic priorities—and its implementation for the future of Europe. He also outlined NVIDIA’s corporate strategy for developing devices that enable more powerful and efficient computing.
Neurocomputing to achieve faster and more sustainable AI systems
The emerging computational paradigm of neurocomputing, based on the emulation of biological nervous systems, was the focus of the keynote address by Mario Lanza, professor at the National University of Singapore. “Artificial intelligence has a titanic hardware problem,” he stated. “Performing the trillions of mathematical operations required with traditional microchips—based on transistors—is very slow and consumes a great deal of space and energy.”
Along these lines, Mario Lanza added, “we have reinvented the transistor to generate, with a single device, the functions required for artificial neural networks; this represents an improvement of three orders of magnitude compared to current implementations.”
The second day of the event, taking place tomorrow, will offer an overview of different trends in artificial intelligence through nine thematic sessions, where representative projects and initiatives based on the use of synthetic data, intelligent robotics and agent-based AI, among others, will be presented. In addition, there will be two sessions dedicated to showcasing success stories, featuring a total of 17 innovative projects that improve processes, drive business and bring new creative perspectives.
About the AI Congress
The AI Congress is an event of CIDAI organized by Eurecat with the support of the Government of Catalonia, through the Secretariat for Digital Policies of the Department of Business and Labour, within the framework of the Catalonia Artificial Intelligence Strategy promoted by the Government. The congress is sponsored by CaixaBank Tech, Conversia, Infini, Softeng, the Catalan Data Protection Authority (APDCAT) and Laboral Kutxa. It also counts on the collaboration of the Barcelona City Council, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the Computer Vision Center, the i2CAT Foundation and the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Center (IDEAI) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech (UPC).
