Keyne Oei and Boye Sjo
We happily welcome Keyne Oei and Boye Sjo as new PhD Research Fellows at SFI Visual Intelligence in Tromsø and Oslo respectively.
We happily welcome Keyne Oei and Boye Sjo as new PhD Research Fellows at SFI Visual Intelligence in Tromsø and Oslo respectively.
By Petter Bjørklund, Communications Officer at SFI Visual Intelligence
Oei and Sjo recently started their PhD positions at SFI Visual Intelligence. Oei's project is connected to the centre's "Medicine and health" innovation area, while Sjo's project is tied to the "Energy" area.
Oei is from Indonesia and received her master's degree in Visual Computing at Universität des Saarlandes. Her thesis focused on self-supervised contrastive learning for video representation with local alignment in expert-learner analysis.
Her PhD project involves developing self-supervised representation learning (SSRL) methods for electronic health records (EHR). This type of data is multi-dimensional, sparse, irregularly sampled, and often heterogeneous, making large-scale supervised learning costly and limiting generalization to clinical settings.
"To address these issues, I focus specifically on self-supervised approaches such as contrastive learning and predictive pretraining to model longitudinal patient trajectories and sequences of medical events," Oei explains.
The main objective is to learn patient representations that capture temporal structure, clinical co-occurrence patterns, and patient-level similarities.
"Another aim is to improve interpretability, which is a key limitation of current SSRL models and a major barrier to clinical trust. Finally, I address transferability and interoperability challenges to support reuse and adoption of learned representations in real-world clinical applications.
Oei looks forward to examine how novel SSRL methods can be adopted and evaluated to practical clinical settings.
"I am also eager to collaborate with researchers working on similar problems as I do", she says.
Sjo is Norwegian and studied applied physics and mathematics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
After finishing his master thesis on quantum computational applications for machine learning and statistics, he worked two years as a data scuence consultant, working on implementing solutions for industrial data.
His PhD project focuses on using state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, namely self-supervised learning and multimodality, to better understand and model the subsurface using great amounts of largely unlabelled drill cutting data. This data comes from wells drilled on the Norwegian continental shelf.
"This can help energy companies work smarter and safer by using what's already there in the best possible way," Sjo says.
"I am looking forward to learn new things, do cutting-edge work, and to meet and collaborate with other clever and like-minded people," Sjo adds.
We happily welcome Rahul Baburajan as a new PhD Research Fellow at SFI Visual Intelligence's hub in Tromsø.
Congratulations to our colleague Sarina Thomas, who has been recognized as one of Norway's Top 50 Women in Tech!
Elisabeth Wetzer forsker på hvordan maskiner kan lære å analysere medisinske bilder – og samtidig forstå hva legene faktisk ser etter (Norwegian news article on dagsavisen.no)
Visual Intelligence researchers organized a preparatory course for UiT AI students who are attending this year's Norwegian AI Championship.
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.
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.