The 35th Alzheimer Europe Conference (the 35th AEC) took place in Bologna (the Bologna Congress Center) Italy, between the 6-8 October 2025, with main theme: "Connecting Science and Communities: The Future of Dementia Care". The conference (in collaboration between Alzheimer Europe, Federazione Alzheimer Italia and Alzheimer Uniti Italia) attracted over 1,500 delegates from 48 countries, setting a new attendance record. More than 800 presentations—including oral, quick oral, and poster formats—showcased the latest research in "dementia" in general, and shared practical knowledge, fostering collaboration among scientific, clinical, and community stakeholders.
 |  |  |
Figures 1, 2, 3: The opening ceremony of the 35th AEC
The conference programme was developed in partnership with Italian co-host organizations and brought together a diverse group of participants: people living with dementia, family members, carers, volunteers, healthcare professionals, policymakers, researchers, and industry representatives.
A key focus was on ensuring the inclusion and comfort of people with lived experience of dementia. Special support activities such as networking events, information sessions, and venue tours were provided before and during the conference. Additionally, a plenary session was fully organized and delivered by people *with* dementia, continuing the conference’s commitment to amplifying their voices. The event highlighted the importance of connecting scientific progress with community needs to advance dementia care.
Here are some of the conference's themes:
- Young onset dementia
- Technology
- Other types of dementia
- Residential care
- Other care services
- People with dementia
- Family carers of people with dementia
- Minority ethnic groups
- Care work force
- Dementia strategies
- Alzheimer associations and campaigns
- Other dementia policies
We presented a poster contribution with the title: "Evaluating Speech-to-Text Models for Swedish Neuropsychological Assessments: a Comparative Study Across Task Types and Models", by Dimitrios Kokkinakis, Herbert Lange, Ricardo Muñoz Sanchez (figure 4). The poster was part of the "Artificial intelligence" section. In the paper we evaluated three models, OpenAI-Whisper, KB-Whisper and Stable-TS, on three primary evaluation metrics: Word Error Rate, the percentage of words inconsistently predicted by a model (WER), Bilingual Evaluation Understudy, n-gram overlap with reference (BLEU) and Google BLEU, balanced precision and recall (GLEU).
Figure 4: Our poster contribution to the conference presented an evaluation of speech-to-text (STT) for full-scale automatic transcription of neuropsychological assessment tests in Swedish
The authors gratefully acknowledge the generous support of The Adlerbertska Foundations, without which participation in the conference would not have been possible. The Adlerbertska Research Foundation was established in 1959 by Axel Adler through a donation of shares. The main purpose of the Foundation is to support scientific research that is being conducted in Gothenburg or its immediate vicinity.