Thomas Nikolai Blekeli focuses on raising awareness of artificial intelligence and realizing new editorial opportunities at NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation). He has played a key role in the development of editorial AI solutions and is the product owner for NRK's internal AI-tool, NRKGPT.

His combination of strategic insight and practical experience makes him a driving force in both upskilling and editorial development within the media industry. Throughout his work, Thomas has focused extensively on training colleagues in the practical and ethical use of artificial intelligence, giving him unique insight into how a large media organization can build AI competence from the ground up.

Gunnar Bovim is a Norwegian physician and professor specializing in neurology. He earned his medical degree from the University of Bergen in 1985 and later completed his doctorate in neurology at the University of Trondheim in 1993. Bovim has held several leadership positions, including serving as Rector of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) from 2013 to 2019. He has also been CEO of Helse Midt-Norge and St. Olavs Hospital. In addition to his role as Chair of the Research Council of Norway, Bovim was Chairman of the Board at Innovation Norway from 2018 to 2022, where he contributed to shaping national innovation strategies.

Lars Bungum is a postdoctoral researcher at NorwAI in Trondheim. With a background in computational linguistics, Bungum has been involved with language modeling since n-gram models were in vogue.  While his previous research mostly concerned Machine Translation, his currents research involves many other NLP applications, such as sentence simplification and reasoning.  As part of the European TrustLLM project, he is developing new methods for LLM evaluation, with a particular focus on testing the linguistic ability of generative models on smaller languages like Norwegian, in particular.

Liv Dingsør is the CEO of Digital Norway, a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the digital transformation of Norwegian businesses, with a particular focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). She brings leadership experience from prominent roles at DNB and Aker ASA and has successfully guided several companies through significant organizational change. Dingsør currently serves on the boards of Innovasjon Norge and Simula, and is the chair of the board at Inventas. In recent years, she has contributed to numerous public councils and committees focused on digitalization and the data economy. She is deeply committed to harnessing the potential of data and technology to benefit the broader business community

Bjørn Fjukstad is a product manager at DIPS and leads the development of AI solutions within the DIPS Arena EHR (Electronic Health Record) system. He holds a PhD in computer science from the Health Data Lab at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where his research focused on interactive systems for health data analysis. At DIPS, his team works on practical AI applications aimed at empowering healthcare personnel and improving patient care, such as tools for summarizing clinical documents (e.g., for discharge summaries), improving information retrieval in the health record, and assisting with referral assessments.
 

Michalis Giannakos is a co-director of the AI Centre for Empowerment of Human Learning (AI-LEARN) — one of six national AI centres in Norway. AI-LEARN focuses on the interaction between humans and artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on developing human-centred infrastructures designed to enhance and empower human learning. AI LEARN is supported by the Research Council of Norway and comprises 10 academic partners, 8 public sector and 8 private sector partners, an international network of academic partners and a nationwide stakeholder network.

Michalis Giannakos is a professor of interaction design and learning technologies at the Department of Computer Science of NTNU, and Head of the Learner-Computer Interaction lab. His work focuses on developing new ways for humans to interact with intelligent learning systems. He has co-authored more than 150 manuscripts published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences and has served as an evaluator for the EC and the US-NSF. He is the editor in chief of Behaviour & Information Technology journal. His research has been funded by diverse sources like the European Commision, Microsoft Research, Meta Reality Labs, The Research Council of Norway (RCN), US-NSF, and Cheng Endowment; Giannakos is also a recipient of a Marie Curie/ERCIM fellowship, and the prestigious «Young Research Talents» grant from the Research Council of Norway. He was one of the outstanding academic fellows of NTNU (2017-2021).

Jon Atle Gulla is director of the Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation (NorwAI). This is a center for research-based innovation (SFI) that develops new technologies for successful and responsible exploitation of data-driven artificial intelligence in industrial innovations.  NorwAI is supported by the Research Center of Norway, three universities, two research institutes and 11 companies.

Jon Atle Gulla is a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim.  He was the head of the Department of Computer and Information Science 2010—2012 and the deputy head 2009-2010 and 2012-2013.  Gulla has a MSc (1988) and a PhD (1993) in Computer Science from the Norwegian Institute of Technology. He has a MSc in Linguistics from the University of Trondheim (1995) and a MSc of Management (Sloan fellowship) from London Business School (2003).  He is a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.

Gulla’s research centers around Semantics and Natural Language Processing and its use in Recommender Systems, Information Retrieval, and Text Analytics.  He has a keen interest in Digitalization and AI-based Innovation and Entrepreneurship, facilitating AI adoption in industrial companies as well as exploring new business opportunities in startups.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen (born 1974) is the CEO of Vend, formerly Schibsted ASA. He previously served as EVP for Nordic Marketplaces at Schibsted from 2019 to June 2024. Christian has extensive experience leading digital marketplaces and technology companies. Before becoming EVP at Schibsted, he was CEO of the global tech company Cxense ASA (2017-2019). Prior to this, he spent over 10 years in various senior roles within Schibsted, including CEO of FINN.no and SVP Product in Schibsted Marketplaces, leading up to the Adevinta spin-off in 2019.

He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science and Information Systems from NTNU and is passionate about building teams and products that deliver exceptional user and customer value.

Vend

Vend (Vend Marketplaces ASA) is a family of marketplaces with a strong Nordic position and 1730 employees. As a leading pure-play marketplaces company within Mobility, Jobs, Real Estate and Recommerce, we provide effortless digital experiences designed for the needs of tomorrow. We do it with a clear sense of purpose, to create sustainable value and long-term growth, for all our stakeholders and society as a whole.

Removing friction drives everything we build, design, and deliver—creating meeting points where real needs meet real solutions. That’s
how we move the world forward: Not by pushing harder, but by making it easier. Easier to choose well. Easier to live sustainably. Easier to turn to smarter. Smart choices made easy.

Vend Marketplaces is listed on Oslo Børs and has an ownership share of approximately 14% in Adevinta, a company that was spun off from Schibsted (previous corporate name for Vend before divesting Media operations) in 2019 and is now privately owned by a group of investors.

Haakon Thue Lie is an IP-management consultant with Dehns and Associate Professor II at NTNU’s Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management. A European Patent, Trademark, and Design Attorney, he helps start-ups, corporations, universities, and research institutes use patents, trade secrets, open source, and branding to balance openness with control. He holds a PhD in trade secret management in open innovation from NTNU (2020) and has worked with IP and innovation in Telenor R&D and the e-learning industry.  Drawing on more than twenty years of advisory work, Haakon's research focuses on intellectual property strategy in university-industry collaboration.

Juan Carlos Lopez, Director of Data & AI at Schibsted Media, revolutionizes journalism with innovative, data-driven strategies. With 20+ years in tech, he leverages AI and responsible data to fuel growth and deliver personalized media experiences.

Hilde Lovett is a special advisor at the Norwegian Directorate of Health and the project manager for the Joint national AI plan for the Norwegian health and care services. She holds a Master's degree in Computer Science and a Master's degree in Technology Management, with a background as a researcher and research director at the Norwegian Computing Center and Telenor, as well as project manager for technology policy at the Norwegian Board of Technology. She has held various responsibilities related to AI and health over the past nine years. 
 

Per Kristian Næss-Fladset is an experienced technologist and technology leader. He is passionate about bridging business and technology to enhance customer value.

He has extensive experience in developing platforms and solutions for financial advisory, as well as other offerings within the financial services industry.

He also possesses deep domain knowledge of the financial sector. Per Kristian joined DNB in 2018. After working with Open Banking, payments, Corporate Lending Transformation, data and Identity, he is now the Group Executive Vice President for Products, Data & Innovation. He is dedicated to promoting collaboration to achieve DNB's goal of building the world's best bank for Norway.

Co-director of Norwegian Center on AI for Decisions (AID). Research Manager for Analytics and AI and Senior Research Scientist in machine learning for industrial applications, hybrid AI (data driven modelling of physical systems), combining machine learning and optimization, explainable AI, data science and statistical analysis. Working on overcoming challenges for implementing machine learning and artificial intelligence in a range of very different industrial settings where physics play a role and data is less than perfect.

Abdul-Kazeem Shamba is a doctoral researcher at the Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation (NorwAI), focusing on meta-learning and contrastive representation learning. My research explores how insights from human learning can inform the development of more efficient machine learning methods, with applications in AI-driven perception and representation.
 

Professor Asgeir J. Sørensen obtained MSc degree in Marine Technology in 1988 at NTNU, and PhD degree in Engineering Cybernetics at NTNU in 1993. In 1989-1992 Sørensen was employed at MARINTEK (SINTEF) as Research Scientist. In the years 1993-2002 Sørensen was employed in various positions in the ABB Group. In December 2002 Sørensen become co-founder of the company, Marine Cybernetics AS, where he was acting as President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) until June 2010. Since 1999 Sørensen has held the position of Professor of Marine Control Systems at the Department of Marine Technology, NTNU. In the period 2013-2023 Sørensen was key scientist and the Director of the Centre for Autonomous Marine Operations and Systems (NTNU AMOS). He is currently director of NTNU VISTA CAROS. Since 2024 Sørensen has been engaged as adjunct professor at UiT the Arctic University of Norway. Sørensen is engaged in bringing fundamental research results into value creation by innovations and entrepreneurships being co-founder of several companies.  

Ketil Thorvik has a long track record with innovation in healthcare, from Hemit, SINTEF and The operating room of the future, St olavs hospital. Ketil is head of the AI-team at Hemit, and he is coordinating the regional work to ensure safe and innovative use of AI in the specialized healthcare services in Mid-Norway.

He was co-author of the chapter Leadership and strategies in Innovasjonsboka (Dagestad, 2023) His background is political science from NTNU and University of Washington.

Lemei Zhang is a postdoctoral researcher at the Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation (NorwAI) at NTNU, Norway. Her research topics include natural language processing, recommender systems, and user modeling. Currently, she focuses on the development of foundational language models and their application for low-resource languages. Her research has appeared in NeurIPS, EMNLP, TACL, TOIS, UMUAI, ECML-PKDD, etc., and she actively serves as a PC member or reviewer for conferences and journals such as NeurIPS, ECAI, AAAI, ACM Computing Surveys, TOIS, UMUAI, and TWEB etc.

Lilja Øvrelid is a Professor of Informatics at the University of Oslo, where she leads the Language Technology Group and is one of the co-directors of the Integreat Center of Excellence for Knowledge-driven ML. Øvrelid’s research focuses on LLM training and evaluation for lesser resourced languages, in particular in a Norwegian/Nordic context. She has worked extensively on resource-creation and data annotation, as well as information extraction from text, e.g. event extraction, fine-grained sentiment analysis and semantic parsing.

Heidrun’s research has focused on the governance of emerging technologies; ranging from nanotechnology over biotechnology to digitalisation. In 2024, she was part of the Norwegian government-appointed expert committee on AI & elections. Heidrun works at the intersection of policy studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS) and has a PhD in political sciences.