Participants and instructors attending the NORA summer school.
Image:
Ieva Dundulienė

Participants and instructors attending the NORA summer school.

Summer course on self-supervised learning

Visual Intelligence-lead course on self-supervised learning as part of the NORA summer school 2023

Visual Intelligence-lead course on self-supervised learning as part of the NORA summer school 2023

Visual Intelligence researchers Michael Kampffmeyer and Kristoffer Wickstrøm were responsible for hosting one of the tracks during this year's NORA summer school, which introduced participants to the fundamental and very recent developments in self-supervised learning. Self-supervised learning is one of the most popular topics within contemporary artificial intelligence research, and constitutes the foundation for recent algorithms like ChatGPT.

The key idea of self-supervised learning is to learn a meaningful representation of complex data. Learning a meaningful representation from data without human supervision is a well established problem in machine learning. However, recent works on self-supervised representation learning have achieved impressive performance on a wide range of different tasks involving data types such as images, time series, and text. In some cases, the performance in these unsupervised method can even rival their supervised counterparts. Self-supervised approaches learn representations in a similar manner as in supervised learning, but creates the labels from unlabeled datasets. How to produce the labels from unlabeled datasets and how to formulate a self-supervised loss are key components in self-supervised learning.

The Visual Intelligence-lead course had participants from both national and international universities, as well as participants from industrial partners. Over five days of exciting lectures the participants were actively involved in both theoretical and practical discussion, which successfully connected young Visual Intelligence researchers with potential collaborators from across the world.

Latest news

Centre Director Robert Jenssen meets Norwegian Minister of Research and Higher Education, Sigrun Aasland

February 6, 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.

Visual Intelligence represented at Arctic Frontiers 2026

February 4, 2026

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 visits Visual Intelligence in Tromsø

February 3, 2026

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.

NLDL 2026 was a great success!

January 12, 2026

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.

Fruitful mentoring session with Professor Mihaela van der Schaar

January 11, 2026

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

uit.no Toppforskere på kunstig intelligens samles i Tromsø

January 5, 2026

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)

unn.no: Forskningsmillioner til pasientrettet KI-satsing

December 23, 2025

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)

Happy Holidays from SFI Visual Intelligence!

December 18, 2025

The Visual Intelligence Management Team, Robert Jenssen, Line Eikvil, Anne Solberg, and Inger Solheim, wishes everyone a happy holiday season and new year!

Anders Waldeland receives the Digital Trailblazer Award 2025

December 4, 2025

Congratulations to Senior Research Scientist Anders Waldeland, who was awarded the Digital Trailblazer Award 2025 at the Dig X Subsurface conference in Oslo, Norway.

sciencenorway.no: AI can help detect heart diseases more quickly

December 3, 2025

Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence that can automatically measure the heart's structure – both quickly and accurately (Popular science article on sciencenorway.no)

State Secretary Marianne Wilhelmsen visits SFI Visual Intelligence and UiT

November 26, 2025

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.

TV2.no: Sier Elon Musk er smartere enn Leonardo da Vinci

November 25, 2025

KI-chatboten Grok har fortalt brukere at verdens rikeste mann er både smartere og sprekere enn noen andre i verden – inkludert basketballstjernen LeBron James og Leonardo da Vinci (Norwegian news article on tv2.no)