50 attendees from the Norwegian AI research community gathered in Tromsø, Norway for the 2025 Norwegian AI Symposium
More than 50 attendees from the Norwegian AI research community gathered in Tromsø, Norway for two days of insightful presentations, interactive technical sessions, and scientific and social interactions.
More than 50 attendees from the Norwegian AI research community gathered in Tromsø, Norway for two days of insightful presentations, interactive technical sessions, and scientific and social interactions.
By Petter Bjørklund, Communications Advisor at SFI Visual Intelligence
The aim of the 2025 Norwegian AI Society (NAIS) Symposium was to bring together AI researchers and practitiners from Norway and Scandinavia to present ongoing work and discuss future directions of artificial intelligence (AI). This year's event was jointly organized by NAIS, SFI Visual Intelligence, and The UiT Machine Learning Group.
After a light lunch and warm welcome by organizers Kerstin Bach and Robert Jenssen, the event kicked off with a stimulating Day 1 program, featuring a keynote by Visual Intelligence PI Elisabeth Wetzer, three technical sessions, the Dissertation Award 2024 presentation, and a refreshing symposium dinner at Maskinverkstedet.
Wetzer's keynote gave the attendees an overview of commonly used techniques from classic image analysis and learning-based approaches, their limitations, and how to efficiently combine tools from both worlds.
The technical sessions featured both full papers and position papers on different topics related to AI, such as visual question answering, AI for digitalized carbon storage, and machine ethics.
This year's Dissertation Award 2024 presentation was given by Mina Young Pedersen—Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam and the Dissertation Award 2024 winner. Her thesis—titled "Malicious Agents and the Power of Few: On the Logic of Abnormality in Social Networks"—draws on computer science, formal logic, and social science to explore urgent questions, such as how can we formally reason about malicious agents in social networks, and how can such reasoning be implemented computationally.
The second and final day of the symposium maintained Day 1's high caliber with a stimulating program, including keynotes by Professors J. S. Marron and Keith Downing, the NAIS general assembly, the final technical session, and the NAIS poster session.
Marron's keynote discussed Data Integration via Analysis of Subspaces (DIVAS). DIVAS improves earlier methods using a novel random direction approach to statistical inference, and by treating partially shared blocks. Its usefulness was illustrated using mortality, cancer and neuroimaging data sets. Downing's keynote explored the origins and anatomy of natural and artificial neural networks as predictive mechanisms.
The NAIS poster session featured recently published work on different aspects on AI—offering an interactive venue for sharing the latest AI research.
Organizers Kerstin Bach and Robert Jenssen thank all who came to Tromsø to present ongoing work and discuss future directions in artificial intelligence.
"It was a delight to host, interact and learn with the Norwegian AI research community here at UiT. I wish to thank the organizing committee, the invited speakers, and session chairs for contributing to a very successful event!," Jenssen says.
"We were happy to once again gather our Norwegian AI colleagues! This year's symposium has been a great platform for seeing what the Norwegian AI research community is currently working on and for discussing recent AI-related work in Norway," Bach adds.
The 2025 NAIS Symposium was jointly organized by the Norwegian AI Society and the UiT Machine Learning Group. The Machine Learning group heads SFI Visual Intelligence, together with partners from the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Computing Center.
We happily welcome Veronica Lachi and Qing Liu as new Associate Professors at SFI Visual Intelligence.
Artur Radzivil is a PhD Research Fellow at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. He visited Visual Intelligence in Oslo from September to November 2025.
Congratulations to Marius Aasan, who successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Oslo on February 10th.
We had the pleasure of talking to UiT students about the career opportunities at SFI Visual Intelligence and UiT at TEKdagen 2026.
Centre Director Robert Jenssen met with Sigrun Aasland, Norwegian Minister of Research and Higher Education, alongside UiT and Aker Nscale representatives to give an update on Aker Nscale's AI Giga Factory in Narvik, Norway.
Zheming Xu is a PhD Research Fellow at Beijing Jiaotong University. She visited Visual Intelligence in Tromsø from September 2025 to January 2026.
Få kvinner søker seg til fag innenfor kunstig intelligens. Det kan skape blindsoner, mener ekspert (Norwegian news story in NRK.no).
Visual Intelligence was represented by Centre Director Robert Jenssen, Associate Professor Kristoffer Wickstrøm, and VI Alumna Sara Björk at the Arctic Frontiers side session "How can AI and satellite collaboration strengthen Arctic resilience?".
Petter Tømmeraas, Director of Data Center Services at Aker Nscale, visited SFI Visual Intelligence to learn more about our research projects and AI startups established by former UiT students.
We happily welcome Keyne Oei and Boye Sjo as new PhD Research Fellows at SFI Visual Intelligence in Tromsø and Oslo respectively.
Congratulations to Børge Solli Andreassen, who successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Oslo on December 18th 2025.
Attracting 280 international AI researchers, the Northern Lights Deep Learning Conference (NLDL) 2026 was successfully organized from January 5th to 9th 2026 at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, Norway.
Visual Intelligence hosted a special NLDL 2026 mentoring session for young researchers with Professor Mihaela van der Schaar – a globally renowned AI researcher and expert
Centre Director and NLDL General Chair Robert Jenssen was interviewed by NRK about this year's Northern Lights Deep Learning Conference.
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270 KI-eksperter fra nært og fjernt møtes ved UiT for å dele siste forskningsnytt. Et av formålene er å styrke internasjonale bånd og samarbeid på tvers av det globale KI-miljøet (Norwegian news article on uit.no)
Med ferske millioner på konto skal Senter for pasientnær kunstig intelligens (SPKI) ved UNN bidra i et stort nasjonalt KI-prosjekt de neste fire årene (News article on unn.no)
We happily welcome Zijun Sun as a new Doctoral Research Fellow at SFI Visual Intelligence in Tromsø, Norway.
The Visual Intelligence Management Team, Robert Jenssen, Line Eikvil, Anne Solberg, and Inger Solheim, wishes everyone a happy holiday season and new year!
Several of our researchers represented SFI Visual Intelligence at EurIPS 2025 – the NeurIPS-endorsed European AI conference.
Congratulations to Senior Research Scientist Anders Waldeland, who was awarded the Digital Trailblazer Award 2025 at the Dig X Subsurface conference in Oslo, Norway.