Freedom is the theme of the 2022 Communication Festival in Camogli which saw the presence of the IIT top management
The 2022 Communication Festival concluded on Sunday, September 11, 2022, after four days of meetings and debates. The event was attended by a large number of guests and the public, who welcomed the ninth edition of a festival that continues to arouse great interest in the media and its professionals. As usual, the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) was represented at the highest levels by its President Gabriele Galateri di Genola, Scientific Director Giorgio Metta, and Nanotechnology Group Leader Alberto Diaspro.
The speakers, who came from a variety of professional backgrounds, including research, journalism, and management, discussed the theme of freedom from different angles. Giorgio Metta, who discussed the topic with Professor Guido Scorza, a member of the Italian Data Protection Authority, moderated by Luca de Biase, a journalist for Il Sole 24 Ore, said that it is inevitable to talk about freedom in research, even when rules tend to limit its scope of action. Science is free by definition, and if it were not, it could not achieve its goals. As Metta suggests, “it is correct to intervene with rules when risks are identified, and then the boundaries of researchers’ actions can be defined.” Professor Scorza has highlighted the challenges of data collection through research: “In the most disparate areas, the best algorithms that will be put into circulation will not come, according to a very realistic assessment, from the research world, but will be offered by the big players on the market. I do not believe that the day is far away when public research will have to turn to private companies to have access to data in greater quantity and quality than at present.”
The green transition was another interpretation of the festival’s central theme, where references to the current energy crisis could not be missing, as well as a theme linked to an element of strong media exposure that has involved some companies: greenwashing. This is a phenomenon, as IIT President Gabriele Galateri pointed out, that has seen large financial companies sanctioned for selling products as green that were not, and even financing activities that had nothing to do with the environment.
The debate, which was attended by the President of IREN Luca dal Fabbro, the CEO of FS Luigi Ferraris, and the President of the San Paolo Group Francesco Profumo, moderated by the editorialist Ferruccio de Bortoli, ended with a pragmatic intervention by President Galateri: adopting a uniform taxonomy to counter the phenomenon of greenwashing. “Taxonomy means,” Galateri recalled, “saying the same things with the same words all over the world: what can be defined as ‘green’? It is essential that all countries, Italy, France, Germany, to name a few, decide to give the same meaning to the word ‘green’. In Europe, a unique definition is being reached that still differs from that used in the United States. In this scenario, it is difficult for global multinationals to be green in Europe, America, and China, where the application of this parameter is very different.”
In his speech, Alberto Diaspro discussed the theme of freedom and the metaverse. “To be free beyond the metaverse means to be endowed with knowledge, to have mastery over things. Everyone is allowed to dream, to dream of being in any world or to be able to enter a secret garden that is of nature, that is of our body, or of other things that we could have access to thanks to all these data and the tools we have.” Diaspro painted a future in which poor people could use the metaverse to pretend to be in exotic places where they could not afford to go. However, we need to pay close attention to these apparent opportunities, which could lead us to a progressive loss of freedom. “To maintain our freedom, we must contribute to the path of knowledge, offering knowledge to others and asking for knowledge.”
The interventions of the Communication Festival will soon be available on the YouTube channel of the event.
