From the left: Sigurd Almli Hanssen and Adrian Duric
We happily welcome Sigurd Almli Hanssen and Adrian Duric as new PhD Candidates at SFI Visual Intelligence's hubs in Tromsø and Oslo respectively.
We happily welcome Sigurd Almli Hanssen and Adrian Duric as new PhD Candidates at SFI Visual Intelligence's hubs in Tromsø and Oslo respectively.
By Petter Bjørklund, Communications Officer at SFI Visual Intelligence
Both Hanssen and Duric recently started their doctoral research positions at SFI Visual Intelligence. Hanssen's project is tied to the centre's "Earth observation" innovation area, while Duric's project is connected to the "Marine science" innovation area.
Hanssen is originally from Evenskjer, a town near Harstad, Norway. He graduated with a master's degree in Applied Physics and Mathematics from UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Spring 2025. His thesis focused on how to apply diffusion models for oil spill detection, in collaboration with industry partner Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT). Building upon his master's thesis, Hanssen's PhD project will focus on using satellite imagery and machine learning for sustainable oil spill monitoring.
Satellite images used for environmental monitoring are often huge in size. Current methods, which slice the images into smaller, more manageable patches, tend to remove the context in which the patches exist in. A core idea of the project is to research methods which allow us to reincorporate the large-scale context of these images.
"This could hopefully reduce some sources of false alarms – that is, when a detection system reports an oil spill even though no actual spill is present. This is critical as false alarms, especially far from shore, can be quite expensive and resource-intensive to investigate," Hanssen explains.
Hanssen says it's inspiring to work with what he deems as an interesting and accomplished group of researchers, both at KSAT and UiT.
"Having worked for years with manual image analysis, I really appreciate the importance of and effect I can have through my research, which I find really exciting," says Hanssen.
Duric is from Oslo, Norway and has a master's degree in Robotics and Intelligent Systems from the University of Oslo, specializing in AI and machine learning. His thesis, written in collaboration with the Simula Research Laboratory, focused on using explanations generated by explainable AI techniques as additional data features to enhance the deep learning models' prediction performance.
His PhD project focuses on developing and utilizing the latest deep learning advances to improve performance on various image recognition tasks within marine imaging. Echosounder data captured from Norwegian waters, which is used to estimate different fish populations at specific locations, will have an important focus.
"From a more technical aspect, I will work on several different research topics that contribute in different ways towards the project: foundation models, distrubuted ML and compression, representation learning and explainable AI being some of them," Duric explains.
Duric says he's eager to produce high-impact contributions that can help society, both on a scientific and applied level.
"This is something that drives me and continues to motivate me every day, and a main reason I decided to pursue a PhD in the first place. I really look forward to collaborating with my colleagues and other fellow researchers," Duric says.
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We happily welcome Nicolo Grometto as a new PhD Candidate at SFI Visual Intelligence in Bodø, Norway.
Visual Intelligence hosted a hybrid meeting with researchers from the Alan Turing Institute at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, Norway.
Visual Intelligence researchers participated in this year's Forskningsdagene: an annual national research festival which aims to stimulate the general public's interest and curiosity in research.
Norge arbeider med å få på plass en egen lov for kunstig intelligens. Loven skal passe på at vi bruker KI på en trygg måte (Norwegian news article at uit.no).
85 researchers from the Visual Intelligence consortium convened for the Visual Intelligence Days: the annual workshop where researchers, user partners and invited guests convene to share knowledge and updates on the latest research and innovations within the centre.
Registration for the Northern Lights Deep Learning Conference 2026 is officially open. Early bird fees are available before December 1st 2025.
Det skal eksperter på kunstig intelligens, cybersikkerhet og juss fra UiT Norges arktiske universitet diskutere på Verdensteatret Kino den 17. september. Arrangementet er gratis og åpen for alle (Norwegian news article at uit.no)
The presentations from the Visual Intelligence Workshop on Foundation Models are now available on the Visual Intelligence YouTube channel.
Congratulations to Nikita Shvetsov for successfully defending his PhD thesis and achieving the PhD degree in Science at UiT The Arctic University of Norway on August 27th 2025.
Det sa digitaliseringsminister Karianne Tung (Ap) da hun besøkte UiT Norges arktiske universitet i Tromsø for å lære mer om utdanning og toppforskning på kunstig intelligens ved universitetet (Norwegian news article at uit.no)
A new study shows how deep learning can achieve human-level performance in estimating uncertainty when classifying foraminifera (News story at EurekAlert.org)
Congratulations to Iver Martinsen and Durgesh Kumar Singh, who successfully defended their PhD theses at UiT The Arctic University of Norway on August 20th and 21st respectively.
Visual Intelligence brought together academia, industry, the institute sector, the Research Council of Norway, and Norwegian politics to discuss why and how Norwegian academia and industry should collaborate more closely to develop innovative artificial intelligence.
João Campagnolo is a PhD Candidate in the Neuroscience Department of the University of Copenhagen (KU). He visited SFI Visual Intelligence in Tromsø from April to May 2025.
Students from EUGLOH partner institutions can now apply for an exclusive mobility scholarship worth 2 900 EUR for the NLDL 2026 Winter School. Application deadline October 3rd 2025
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.
Last week, we wished Aasland—accompanied by Political Advisor Munir Jaber and Senior Adviser Finn-Hugo Markussen—welcome to the Norwegian Computing Center (NR). One of the visit's goals was to showcase ongoing Visual Intelligence projects at NR.
Alba Ordoñez and Anders U. Waldeland presented ongoing work on seismic foundation models and an interactive seismic interpretation engine at EAGE Annual 2025 in Toulouse, France.