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.
Visual Intelligence hosted over 45 international AI researchers for the DL2026 workshop at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
Visual Intelligence will be well represented at MICCAI 2026, one of the leading AI conferences on medical imaging and computer assisted intervention, with two accepted research papers.
Visual Intelligence co-organized and attended the "Foundations of Arctic AI and Generative Forecasting": an inaugural workshop in the P1 Arctic AI program.
PhD Candidates Solveig Thrun and Christian Salomonsen attended the Datacloud Global Congress' Talent in Tech programme, which invited emerging talent to a unique programme designed to inspire, educate, and connect young professionals with senior leaders from global tech giants.
We warmly welcome Georgios Leontidis as a new Professor at SFI Visual Intelligence's hub at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
Centre Director Robert Jenssen was interviewed by Norsk rikskringkasting (NRK) about the Japan-Norway AI Innovation Forum in Tokyo, Japan.
En ny AI-løsning utviklet ved UiT kan gjøre det enklere å avdekke feilrapportering og ulovlig fiske. Nå skal Norges Råfisklag teste teknologien i praktisk bruk (News article on kystogfjord.no)
Principal Investigator Kristoffer Wickstrøm was interviewed by Norsk rikskringkasting (NRK) about the Artificial Intelligence Day at UiT- The Arctic University of Norway.
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En ny, åpent tilgjengelig KI-modell kan endre hvordan geologer tolker seismikk. Den norske grunnmodellen lover raskere analyser, lavere terskel for innovasjon og nye måter å forstå undergrunnen på.
Centre Director Robert Jenssen was interviewed by Norsk rikskringkasting (NRK) about AI in fisheries and this year's UArctic (University of the Arctic) Congress on the Faroe Islands.
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Professor and AI expert Robert Jenssen is attending the Japan-Norway AI Innovation Forum and Japan-Norway Research Symposium, two high-level meetings with Norwegian and Japanese government leaders, business actors and researchers.
Visual Intelligence researchers Solveig Thrun and Kristoffer Wickstrøm took their research out of the lab and to Tromsø city centre as part of Pint of Science 2026.
Subsurface Digital Manager and former Visual Intelligence board member Cathrine Tegnander will serve as the elected leader of Visual Intelligence's board.
The Call for Papers and Abstracts for the Northern Lights Deep Learning (NLDL) Conference 2027 is officially announced – with submission deadlines on August 7th and Mid-September 2026 respectively.
The field of Visual Intelligence is continuously transforming. Chief Research Scientist Arnt-Børre Salberg dives deeper into the current trends in the field of visual intelligence as of early 2026.
Generativ kunstig intelligens er imponerende, men ikke alltid så nyttig til å løse industrielle problemer (Norwegian op-ed in digi.no).
Congratulations to Marit Dagny Kristine Jenssen, who successfully defended her PhD thesis at UiT The Arctic University of Norway on April 10th
The NCS model, a seismic foundation model trained on data from the Norwegian data repository for subsurface data, is now available as an open-source model, allowing anyone to download, utilize, and further develop the model.
The Visual Intelligence Annual Report 2025, highlighting the centre's progress, activities, achieved innovations, staff, funding, and publications for 2025, is now available to read on our websites.
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Congratulations to Centre Director Robert Jenssen, who received UiT's Research and Development Award at the university's annual celebration.