Ten posters competed for best demo at NorwAI. Ten future AI programmers presented their projects on stage. Nils Barlaug, industry PhD at NorwAI for Cognite, won the NorwAI Innovate Award and was awarded NOK 10 000 for his contribution. 

His own words:

- I had a poster about explainable data integration. Sometimes you have two different systems that describe the same things, but no common identifiers to understand what is the same in two systems, Nils Barlaug says. 

Nils uses the example of two product databases to explain:

- You want to find out what the same products are in each system. This problem is called entity matching. Then it is possible to use complicated models / machine learning models / AI to solve it, but it is often difficult to understand how it is done. It’s a kind of AI magic.

This makes it difficult to trust the system, and addition, it is also difficult to troubleshoot.

- I have developed a method to explain, in a simple way, how such entity matching models do their choices, Nils says. 

The poster session attracted many participants at the conference, discussing and learning from the projects the jury awarded to join the session.