Aasan defending his PhD thesis at the University of Oslo.
Congratulations to Marius Aasan, who successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Oslo on February 10th.
Congratulations to Marius Aasan, who successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Oslo on February 10th.
By Petter Bjørklund, Communications Officer at SFI Visual Intelligence
Aasan is a PhD Research Fellow at Visual Intelligence and the Digital Signal Processing and Image Analysis Group at the University of Oslo.
His thesis, titled "From Continua to Objecthood: On Tokenization and Perceptual Grouping in Vision", argues that the energy-hungriness and unintelligbility of modern vision systems is not based on how much data machines see, but how they see it. By letting models learn how images naturally divide into meaningful visual regions, Aasan argues that they can focus on structure and form rather than minute pixel-level details.
Aasan's trial lecture was titled From "Convolutions to Transformers: How Modern Vision Models See Images"
Today’s AI vision models can recognize faces, animals, and objects with astonishing accuracy, and they keep improving as we feed them more data and provide them with more computing power. But this progress comes at a price: modern vision systems are increasingly large, energy-hungry, and difficult to interpret or understand.
This thesis argues that the problem is not only how much data machines see, but how they see it. Humans do not analyze images pixel by pixel; instead, we focus on shapes, regions, and relationships in visual scenes. The research presented here shows that artificial intelligence can be convinced to do the same. By letting models learn how images naturally divide into meaningful visual regions, they can focus on structure and form rather than minute pixel-level details.
The result is a new way of building vision systems that are more effective, accurate, and interpretable. As visual AI becomes part of everyday life it becomes increasingly important to develop models that are faster, more transparent, and more sustainable.
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.
Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence that can automatically measure the heart's structure – both quickly and accurately (Popular science article on sciencenorway.no)
Congratulations to Jørgen Agersborg, who successfully defended his PhD thesis at UiT The Arctic University of Norway on November 28th.
State Secretary Marianne Wilhelmsen visited UiT The Arctic University of Norway to learn more about SFI Visual Intelligence and UiT's AI initiatives in education and research.