Biography
Dr. Diego Perino is the Director of the AI Institute at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), where he leads a team of 150 researchers advancing multimodal foundation models, trustworthy AI, and AI for Science across multidisciplinary domains.
Prior to joining BSC, Diego spent several years in leadership roles at Meta, heading teams in GenAI Evaluation, Safety Evals, and Responsible AI Fairness Innovation for open-source models like Llama and global product surfaces. His career spans over two decades at the intersection of AI, networking, and systems, including roles as Director of Telefónica Research and Senior Research Engineer at Bell Labs (Alcatel-Lucent) and Orange Labs. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Université de Paris Diderot, has published over 100 scientific papers, and holds more than 10 granted patents.
Sessions
- AI FoundationsSpeaker
Debate 3 — Sovereign AI or Surrender? Should Europe Stop Outsourcing Its AI Future?
Wednesday 23 September, 12:00 – 12:55Auditorium StageEurope is building 13 AI Factories, funding Mistral and Aleph Alpha, demanding open weights, and writing the world's strictest AI law. Yet 90% of European AI compute still runs on AWS, Azure and GCP, and the foundation model leaderboards are American and Chinese. So is sovereign AI the project of the decade for European strategic autonomy — or an expensive industrial-policy fantasy that taxes EU founders without producing winners? One debater says Europe must stop renting its future. The other says we already lost — partner up and accept it.
With Damien Acheson, Justin Strharsky, Jan Kavalírek, Pedro Romera, Siobhan Fairman, Nouamane Tazi
- AI FoundationsSpeaker
Panel 19 - From BSC to Brussels: Europe's Supercomputing Bet on AI
Wednesday 23 September, 16:15 – 16:55Panel StageFrontier AI runs on supercomputers — and right now, Europe is on a building spree. The AI Factories initiative is wiring 13 supercomputers across the continent. Barcelona's MareNostrum 5 already sits in the global top tier. National centres are competing for GPUs, talent and political backing, on the bet that sovereign compute means sovereign AI. But does it? We bring together the people running Europe's biggest AI compute infrastructure, the policymakers funding the push, and the startups and researchers actually trying to use this hardware — to ask whether Europe is building real industrial capacity or expensive symbolism, who gets access, how it stacks up against the hyperscalers, and what the next five years of European AI infrastructure actually look like.
With Ziad Matar, Raphaëlle Achach