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Vincenzo Sciacca

Head of Product
at Almawave
Business Data
LinkedIn
Personal Bio

Vincenzo Sciacca is the head of product for the cognitive technologies at Almawave. He is responsible for developing new ideas to address market needs and addressing market opportunities. Vincenzo leads a team that sets the strategy, roadmap and feature definition, ensuring that the products supports Almawave’s overall AI strategy and goals. He moved to Almawave after a long experience working for global companies, playing several roles in software R&D teams, Cloud and AI technical sales departments and gaining a rich experience and knowledge as Software Architect, leading many international software project. Vincenzo is also an active inventor, achieving multiple patents and authoring technical papers and he always strived to apply AI/ML to traditional IT projects. Vincenzo holds courses in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Presentation title: 
A Proprietary LLM for Sustainable Adoption of Generative AI in Building Enterprise-Grade NLP Applications — The Tanzania Case Study
Presentation description: 
AI giants are developing increasingly large models optimized for cloud and personal productivity. However, enterprise adoption faces challenges such as scalability, high costs, environmental impact, privacy, regulatory compliance, language and cultural biases. To address these issues, Almawave is creating Velvet: an open-weight, multilingual, and multimodal LLM primarily focused on Italian, major European languages, and Brazilian Portuguese. Velvet will serve as the cornerstone of an offering that enables fine-tuning of LLMs for specific, localized tasks, providing sustainable, precise, and culturally relevant solutions. Almawave has also established a significant partnership with Tanzania’s Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) Commission. This collaboration began in 2020 with an initiative to provide a transcription solution for the Tanzanian judiciary, aimed at enhancing judicial efficiency. Almawave subsequently signed (October 2024) a Memorandum of Understanding with Tanzania’s ICT Commission to customize Velvet for Swahili, with the goal of improving digital accessibility and operational efficiency across the country.