Dr. Wickstrøm together with his opponents, supervisors and representatives from UiT after his defense.
Kristoffer Wickstrøm defended his PhD thesis “Advancing deep learning with emphasis on data-driven healthcare” on Oct 28 at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
Kristoffer Wickstrøm defended his PhD thesis “Advancing deep learning with emphasis on data-driven healthcare” on Oct 28 at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
Wickstrøm has in his thesis developed a range of novel deep learning methods aiming at producing a new level of interpretability and uncertainty quantification for health-related applications within medical computer vision and analysis of patient data from electronic health records.
Wickstrøm defended his work publicly and under the scrutiny of his opponents, Irina Voiculescu, University of Oxford, and Lars Kai Hansen, Technical University of Denmark
Prior to the actual defense, Wickstrøm gave his so-called trial lecture (a requirement in Norway) entitled "Technical aspects of translating AI algorithms into real life medical practice, within the design and implementation of Randomized Controlled Trials".
The right to health is a fundamental human right, but numerous challenges face those who wish to comply. Shortage of trained health personnel, increases in costs, and an aging population are just a few examples of obstacles that arise in the healthcare sector. Tackling such problems is crucial to provide high quality and reliable healthcare to people around the world. Many researchers and healthcare professionals believe that data-driven healthcare has the potential to solve many of of these problems. Data-driven methods are based on algorithms that learn to perform tasks by identifying patterns in data, and often improve in line with the amount of data. A key driving force in contemporary data-driven healthcare is deep learning, which is part of the representation learning field where the goal is to learn a data representation that is beneficial for performing some task. Deep learning has lead to major improvements in important healthcare domains such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, deep learning algorithms lack explainability, do not provide a notion of uncertainty, and struggle when tasked with learning from unlabeled data. These are fundamental limitations that must be tackled for deep learning-based data-driven healthcare to reach its full potential. Towards tackling these limitation, we propose new methodology within the field of deep learning. We present the first methods for capturing uncertainty in explanations of predictions, and we introduce the first framework for explaining representations of data. We also introduce a new method that utilizes domain knowledge to extract clinically relevant features from medical images. While our emphasis is on healthcare applications, the proposed methodology can be employed in other domains as well, and we believe that the innovations in this thesis can play an important part in creating trustworthy deep learning algorithms that can learn from unlabeled data.
Centre Director Robert Jenssen represented Visual Intelligence at Svarte Natta 2025 – North Norway's journalist and media conference organized by the Norwegian Union of Journalists.
Congratulations to PhD Candidate Preetraj Bhoodoo, who recently won the Best Poster Presentation Award at the PRESIMAL Autumn Reserach School 2025.
We happily welcome Sigurd Almli Hanssen and Adrian Duric as new PhD Candidates at SFI Visual Intelligence's hubs in Tromsø and Oslo respectively.
AI expert Eirik Agnalt Østmo explains that the law is intended to make AI technology safe for everyone (Popular science article on sciencenorway.no)
Aitor Sánchez is a PhD candidate at the Intelligent Systems Group of the University of the Basque Country in Spain. He visited Visual Intelligence in Tromsø from March to June 2025.
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