18th Round Table Europe – 14-15 November 2024 – Florence

• Union of International Associations: President since 2017 - Bruxelles

• Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CoNGO): President 2011-2018; First Vice President 2018-2025 - Geneva, New York, Vienna

• Council of Europe Expert Council on NGO Law: President 2008- 2018; Honorary President from 2018 - Strasbourg

• World Future Council: Senior Policy Advisor since 2012 - Hamburg

• International Baby Food Action Network/GIFA: Vice President since 2020 - Geneva

• Titular of the World Order of the Smile (since 1979) – Government of Poland

• International Civil Society Forum for Democracy (ICSFD, 2006): President - Doha

• World Civil Society Conference (WOCSOC, 1999): President - Montreal

• International Council of Voluntary Agencies: Executive Director 1964-1978 and 1990-1991 - Geneva

Gianni Virgili is Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Florence and was Professor at Queen's University Belfast (2021-2022). He is Director of the Ophthalmology Specialization Program, director of the SOD Optics Pathophysiology clinical unit and was Coordinator of the Regional Center for Visual Education and Rehabilitation at Careggi Hospital in Florence, Italy. He has specialized in medical retina since 1992.

He received a Master's degree in Epidemiology from the University of Turin in 2005 and has received extensive training in biostatistics and research methods, particularly in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. He has developed skills in healthcare data management and collaborated with the Regional Health Agency in pharmacoepidemiology studies in Tuscany.

He has collaborated in particular with Cochrane, where he holds the following editorial roles: Editor of Cochrane Eyes and Vision (2006); Coordinator of the Cochrane Eyes and Vision Satellite for Diagnostic Accuracy of Tests (2011); Editor of the Diagnostic Test Accuracy Working Group (2011). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Internal and Emergency Medicine (HTA and Clinical Evidence section, 2010), Academic Editor of the journal PLOS ONE (2015) and Executive Editor of the American Journal of Ophthalmology (2016).

His main areas of clinical interest include primary research on the diagnosis and treatment of medical retinal disorders, visual function and visual rehabilitation.

He was a member of the WHO Technical Working Group for the Intervention Package for Refractive Errors and the Rehabilitation Intervention Package for Visual Rehabilitation. In this project, as a member of Cochrane Eyes and Vision, Gianni Virgili provided technical support to the project regarding the procurement, use or preparation of systematic revisions and clinical guidelines.

Scientific director of the Low Vision Study Center in Milan
Medical director of the Eye Center Eye.com in Palermo
LOC President for Vision 2025

Paolo Limoli has always dealt with low vision. In 1992 he developed and patented software for the virtual analysis of visually impaired patients. He introduced pulsed stimulation into visual rehabilitation. He has been studying cell therapies and their secretome since 2000 in order to reduce the impact of degenerative pathologies on vision and was the first in the world to implant, in 2012, autologous stem cells in the suprachoroidal space of the eye for this purpose.

Limoli, together with Dr. Villani, both members of the scientific council of the Low Vision Academy, is chosen by the International Society for Visual Research and Rehabilitation as the ideal candidate for the organization of a possible Italian candidacy for Vision 2025, the world congress that deals with the impact of low vision on people and their rehabilitation possibilities. This choice is due to Limoli's direction of the Low Vision Academy for over 14 years and Villani's connections with international scientific societies.
Italy's opponent in this match, so to speak, was our German friend Prof. Bernhard Sabel, a well-known international neuroscientist, who nominated Magdebugo for the same reasons. Sabel, also being part of the International Society, had a good chance of bringing home the result.

Without being discouraged, Limoli and Villani created a network involving in the scientific committee Gianni Virgili, and other organizations such as Prisma in the figure of its secretary Dr. Anna D'Ambrosio and the IAPB (International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness) in the figure of its director Dr. Filippo Amore. All organizations which are active in the field of visual rehabilitation.

A clinical approach is proposed at the conference, starting from the assumption that those who have a visual impairment would not want to have it, or if forced to tolerate it, ask that it be contained and not progress. This is pleasing and together with the winning choice of the city of Florence which is and will always be in the heart of every person in the world, the International Society gives confidence in our proposal. Vision 2025 will take place in Florence in September 2025.
The legacy that will remain from a conference of this kind in our territory is first and foremost the creation of a network between all the associations and institutions that deal with low vision, with the sharing of knowledge in this regard. Furthermore, it will allow the Italian clinical world to deepen its knowledge of low vision thanks to the participation of the best professionals in the world, but will also influence those involved in visual rehabilitation of the current possible therapeutic strategies.
I believe that the patient in the future will be able to have a more limited and more sustainable visual deficit.

Author of ’Customer Success,’ ‘Mind the Change’, and ‘Marketing Thinking’ and curator of the Italian edition of the MIT Sloan books, Alberto is a technology and business innovation expert.

For ten years, Alberto has led Future Thinking, an international innovation-accelerator hub of Wunderman-Thompson, and he is the Head of Innovation of Retail Hub.

He focuses on helping companies to find a “sweet spot” between marketing, technological innovation, and emerging business models.

Alberto is a former member of the Scientific Committee of Confindustria.

Alberto is a speaker with many business groups and mentors at corporations and universities like Imperial College of London and the Bocconi University in Milan.

He lives in Miami, Florida.

Diye Ndiaye is graduated from the University of Florence in Educational Science with a thesis in cultural anthropology, and subsequently obtained the DEA (Diplôme d'étude Appliqué) again in social anthropology and ethnology from the EHESS (École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) of Paris.

Councilor at the Municipality of Scandicci from May 2014 until recently June 2024, with the responsibilities of Education, Professional Training, Cooperation and International Relations, Promotion of Associations, Equal Opportunities.

Always dealing with the issue of gender and women's empowerment, she was involved in the issues of fighting Female Genital Mutilation, participating in the European Euronet-FGM network and collaborated with numerous associations present in the Florentine area and member of the non-governmental organization COSPE (Cooperation for the Development of Emerging Countries), she coordinated the F4A project (Foundations For Africa) on the institutional support and supervision of Senegalese associations in Tuscany and Emilia Romagna and ] and also promoted the "The Color of Respect" event to say No to racism and sexism in the institutional context.

Furthermore, her involvement in association movements strengthened her ability to adapt to new situations. These activities have led her to produce various contributions: on the occasion of numerous seminars, conferences and talks organized on issues of gender, "identity" and "development" and publications. She is author of Parenañu, "we are ready". Ethnography of a female enterprise in Senegal, Rome, C.I.S.U, 2004; “Breaking the wall of silence!”, in Busoni M., Laurenzi E. (ed.) The body of symbols. Theoretical and political nodes of a debate on female genital mutilation, SEID, Florence; Women and politics: the African chapter, in Africa, Testimonies. Bimonthly – Year LIV January – April, n. 1-2 (475-476), pp. 79-84, Florence, 2011

She is currently pursuing a PhD in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Milan Bicocca.

Sara Lucatello obtained her undergraduate degree and PhD from University of Padova, Italy. After postdoctoral work at University of Texas Austin, she was INAF fellow in Padova and later Excellence Cluster Universe fellow in Munich. She joined the faculty at INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova in 2006. Her scientific interests focus on spectroscopic studies of stellar populations, the formation and chemo-dynamical evolution of the Milky Way and its subcomponents, large Galactic stellar surveys and Big Data in Astronomy.

She has served as a member and co-chair of the Committee of Participation of Women in Sloan and as a member of the Committee for Inclusion in Sloan, the organs for diversity and equal opportunities in the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) collaboration. Since July 2024 she is serving as President of the European Astronomical Society, with a portfolio focusing on diversity and inclusion issues, and she is part of the organizing committee of EAS2024, to be held in Padua in July.

Michela Pacifici is a zoologist and conservation biologist whose scientific research focuses on analysing the relationships between human impacts and the extinction risk of terrestrial mammals on a global scale through the use of models. Michela is a researcher at the Global Mammal Assessment lab at Sapienza University of Rome. She is President and founding member of the Society for Conservation Biology Italy Chapter.

Stefano Berretti is an Associate Professor at the Dept. of Information Engineering of the University of Florence (UniFI), Italy, and the head of the PhD program in Smart Computing at the same University. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Lille, France, and at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. The research interests of Stefano Berretti focus on developing artificial intelligence solutions for 3D computer vision problems such as face and facial expression recognition, human behavior understanding, face reconstruction and generation in 3D and 4D, geometric methods for shape analysis, and modeling. On these themes he has published over 220 articles in peer reviewed international journals and conference proceedings. He has worked on several research projects funded by the EU, the MUR and the Tuscany region, and currently is the principal investigator for UniFI of the AI4Debunk Horizon Europe project. He organized workshops on Learning with few or without annotated face, body, and gesture data (LFA at IEEE FG 2023 and 2024), Generation of Human Face and Body Behavior (GHB at WACV 2021, ICIAP 2023). He has been a general chair of The Eurographics Symposium on 3D Object Retrieval (3DOR) 2022, and of the Conference on Smart Tools and Applications in Graphics 2021 and has served as an area chair for ACM Multimedia (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), IEEE Face and Gesture Recognition (2019, 2020), and program chair for the Int. Conf. on Smart Multimedia (2022, 2024). He organized special issues on the Computers & Graphics journal, ACM TOMM, IEEE TII, IEEE TCE, IEEE JBHI, and ACM TALLIP. He is the Associate Editor in Chief for Digital Communications of the IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, an Associate Editor of the ACM Trans. of Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (ACM TOMM), and of the IET Computer Vision journal. He was also the Information Director of ACM TOMM. He is a Senior member of IEEE.

Martina Fondi - Partner - Business Developer & Head of Forestry - Graduated in International and Diplomatic Sciences, before joining Treedom I worked in Consulates and Diplomatic Offices in Italy and around the world, always with a focus on international cooperation and sustainable development. In 2012, after a Master in Green Economy I met Treedom and today I am responsible for the coordination of all Treedom's forestry and R&D projects globally, consolidating my experience in agroforestry, sustainable management and international relations.

Daniel Laqua is Associate Professor at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

He is the author of Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe (London, 2023) and The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1880–1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige (Manchester, 2013) as well as the (co-)editor of three books and six special issues of academic journals.

He has published widely on the history of international movements and organisations, including a volume on the history of UIA, International Organizations and Global Civil Society: Histories of the Union of International Associations (London, 2019).

He is currently leading a large international project on ‘Global Governance, Trust and Democratic Engagement in Past and Present’ (funded via the Trans-Atlantic Platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities) and is serving as co-lead of a research network entitled ‘Rethinking Internationalism: Histories and Pluralities’.

Ryan has worked as a web and database developer at UIA since 2011. He is responsible for the user interface of UIA's databases, the ongoing development of its website and the visual identity of the organization. He also provides regular training sessions on the use of UIA's Yearbook of International Organizations and International Congress Calendar digital publications.

Before joining UIA, Ryan ran a communications design studio crafting online identities for associations and small businesses.