News
Widepread industry engagement in master students work
Data from different Industries was represented when master students presented their thesis. Domains included banking, media, energy industry, defence, education and maritime sectors.
Photo: Kai T. Dragland
The race is on for the 6G network
Leading nations and top tech companies now take part in the race for defining the next generation networks. 6G will be the sixth-generation standard currently under development for wireless communications technologies supporting cellular data networks.
- 5G is now rolled out in Norway for commercial use. NorwAI research looks into the future possibilities 6G will provide, says Telenor Research fellow Kenth Engø-Monsen.
NorwAI Newsletter Archive
Unlocking the mysteries of innovation
Bridging the gap between academia and industry is easier said than done, but it is a crucial condition for making innovation happen. NorwAI is paving the path to innovation. To do so, Associate Professor Nhien Nguyen suggests a framework for enabling knowledge creation.
Trusting technology is to understand its performance
Frank Børre Pedersen, VP and Programme Director at DNV, says that the starting point for trusting the technology is understanding its performance.
Norway may take a world-leading AI role
professors Kjetil Nørvaag, NTNU (left)
and Krisztian Balog, UiS, headed the ECIR forum
for Information Retrieval in April. Photo: NorwAI
-One particular area where the Norwegian AI stands out is the genuine interest in fairness, transparency and explainability, which align with societal values in Norway. Therefore, I can see Norwegian AI research taking a world-leading role in these areas, says professor Krisztian Balog at the University of Stavanger and Staff Research Scientist at Google.
Krisztian Balog heads NorwAIs work package for language technologies. He cooperates with NorwAI's research director, professor Kjetil Nørvaag. The two professors joined their skills as general chairs of the successful ECIR conference in Stavanger during the week before Easter, giving an international audience insight on new research results in the broadly conceived area of Information Retrieval.
A silent challenge
The Language Council of Norway has contacted NorwAI about current research on sign languages. There is ongoing research in Europe on AI-driven sign language processing, and NorwAI is considering looking into the use of machine learning for interpreting the Norwegian sign language. The visual and silent language is an official minority language in NorwAI. Research will face some very special challenges if a project materializes.
World success - “Elements of AI” also a hit in Norway
member of NorwAI
Professor Helge Langseth headed the introduction of the Norwegian edition of the Finnish success course «Elements of AI». Thousands of Norwegians have used the six-part course to introduce themselves to the "mysteries" of artificial intelligence.
Innovation Board members appointed
Chair of the Board, Telenor VP Ieva Martinkenaite, personally engaged herself in recruiting innovaters to her committee. She went across the Atlantic to find two of her choices for the job.
Tailoring news content: How Scandinavian mediahouses have tested recommender systems
Photo: Kai T Dragland, NTNU
Scandinavian newspapers were early adapters to online services 25 years ago. Gradually some of them explored how recommender systems would enable individually tailored news streams. In an article in AI Magazine recently NorwAI associates, headed by Center director Jon Atle Gulla (picture) explore how Scandinavian media organizations are coping with these new technological opportunities.
It is well known how large-scale media houses and technology companies have successfully made use of recommender systems, research indicating substantial improvements of click rates and user satisfaction.
Smaller media houses
It is less understood how smaller media houses are coping with this new technology, how the technology affects their business models, their editorial processes, and their news production in general.
In this research article, the authors report on the experiences from numerous Scandinavian media houses like online publications of Polaris Media and broadcasters like NRK. They have experimented with various recommender strategies and streamlined their news production to provide personalized news experiences.
Man and machine
Interestingly, editor governed media houses have found it undesirable to automate the entire recommendation process. In the intersection between man and machine, many media houses look for approaches that combine automatic recommendations with editorial choices.
Successful PhD thesis defence for Lemei Zhang
New National AI Cloud funded: Providing compute power on demand
A national infrastructure offering new digital tools can provide researchers with compute power on demand, limiting the need for individual projects or research groups to wrestle with buying their own dedicated machine learning hardware - hardware that often ends sitting idle much of the time.
Cooperation with PERSEUS adds new PhD students to NorwAI
The Horizon 2020 funded PERSEUS programme, in an interdepartemental effort by IE Faculty at NTNU, has generously awarded NorwAI with additional PhDs. The students will start their work in 2022.
Ingelin Steinsland at
the Departement of Mathematical
Sciences is the project coordinator
for the ambitious PERSEUS programme.
Photo: Kai T. Dagland, NTNU
HRH Crownprince Haakon Magnus wanted insights on AI’s future
A jovial tone and the discussion floated smoothly when our future king wanted to know more about the possibilities AI can offer Norway. NorwAI center head Jon Atle Gulla painted with ease a positive narrative, although there are dilemmas, for one of the most promising technologies at hand.
Photo: Kai T Dragland, NTNU
The winner is ... Purple Rhino
With the mysterious team’s name of Purple Rhino, these three young guys won the hackathon at NorwAI Innovate.
Need for an iPhone moment
New Language Models in NorwAI
The NorwAI center is determined to provide new Norwegian language models that are significantly larger and better than what is available to-day and can easily be employed in advanced Norwegian NLP applications for industrial use, says center director professor Jon Atle Gulla.
An amazing view
Chairman of the board Sven Størmer Thalow, daily EVP and Chief Data and Technology Officer in the Schibsted Group, says that the conference NorwAI Innovate had the ambition to become the most important meeting place for Norway's AI environment.
- The conference was sold out. I think we are already the largest in Norway of its kind. NorwAI is an ambitious project that has brought together many important Norwegian industrial companies and academic institutions for a joint effort. It bodes well for the sequel.
Retriever trust data insight for better business
Retriever steps up its more than decade long work for digital development by joining NorwAI. Other media analysis companies worldwide had questions to ask.
Projects in NorwAI - The human robot
The two "summer research assistants" Christian Riksvold and Lars Ådne Heimdal at NorwAI have spent the summer weeks getting to know the very latest generation of robots.
For more details on the development of the dialogue system in the project: Furhat Dialogue System
Meet Benjamin Kille, a new NTNU postdoctoral fellow, associated to NorwAI
Benjamin Kille joined NTNU and the Department of Computer Science as a postdoctoral fellow just recently, from 1st May. He is a member of the AI/Big Data collaboration project between DNB and NTNU, and his work will be closely connected to the work packages on language technologies and recommender systems in NorwAI.
Meet our postdoctoral fellow Peng Liu
Peng works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation (NorwAI) at NTNU, and started in December 2020. He is now working on Large-Scale Norwegian Language Models in various applications which is the first “deep dive” innovation project at NorwAI.org.
Wind power - powered by AI
Bringing assets to the table
Is AI still Cool?
Ieva Martinkeinate, VP at Telenor, gave the audience an inspired state-of-the-art overview of artificial intelligence by the end of 2021. Is it still cool?
Our research strategy: Generic and multi-disciplinary
Our approach to research at NorwAI is fundamentally multi-disciplinary, consisting of both technical-oriented and socio-economic research. Research in NorwAI will focus on generic research areas within AI that can support the innovation activities in the center.
Consumers on the move - and we must reconnect
Our customers move into digital solutions and we need to be able to reconnect in a digital setting. Deep personalization in combination with trustworthy AI will be a cornerstone in our digital offerings for the future, says Karl Aksel Festø, Head of CoE Advanced Analytics at DnB.
Research activities - Visions and plans
-Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible (Alan Turing)
At NxtMedia Conference, Professor Jon Atle Gulla talks about his dreams for the years to come as NorwAI’s center director in a dialogue with Astrid Undheim, Vice President at SpareBank1 SMN and Schibsted’s EVP and Chief Data and Technology Officer Sven Størmer Thaulow. The talk is led by editor Ingeborg Volan at Dagens Næringsliv. Video in Norwegian:
My return to old halls
NorwAI’s COB, Sven Størmer Thalow, reveals his special relation to NTNU where he once studied computer science in the internet hype years of the 90’ies. He returns to Trondheim with high hopes and expectations to the possibilities of NorwAI.
Why is the international publisher Schibsted heading a 5, possible 8 years, research program? Sven Størmer Thaulow, EVP of the media giant, explains the belief in AI’s transformable powers in this talk (in Norwegian).
Ultimately it all leads up to industrial innovations
The focus of NorwAI is research-based innovation based on data-driven AI, says Chief Scientist at SINTEF Arne Jørgen Berre, Innovation Director at NorwAI, whose work package aim to coordinate all innovation activities in the center.
Yes, we love ribbon cutting
The kick-off for the Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation, NorwAI, took place mid-November 2020.
NorwAI will forge data to values
The pace of innovation will be increased for Norwegian industry as Norway invests large sums in artificial intelligence. The new research center NorwAI at NTNU in Trondheim aims at being the national power center on AI, bringing together the largest players in industry and academia.
The center will be a growth engine where the most ambitious partners gather for business-oriented research and innovation under NTNU's and SINTEF's leadership.