Visual Intelligence Days 2026 was a success!

100 researchers, user partners and invited guests gathered in Oslo, Norway for the Visual Intelligence Days: the centre's annual conference for sharing knowledge and updates on the latest research and innovations.

By Petter Bjørklund, Communications Officer at SFI Visual Intelligence

The VI Days consists of two content-rich days of presentations, collaborative work sessions, as well as scientific and social interaction among the centre's researchers and user partners.

The event took place from September 23rd and 24th at Quality Hotel Gardermoen in Oslo, Norway.

Pre-program event on Agentic AI

Before kickstarting the conference, the Visual Intelligence Graduate School (VIGS) organized a pre-program event at Fabrikken Bar & Spill in Oslo city centre. The pre-program's aim was to familiarize the centre's young researchers with agentic AI tools, what they can be used for, and how to apply them to assist various research processes.

Professor Georgios Leontidis organized and led a collaborative work session on the topic, featuring an introductory talk followed by practical tasks centered on our innovation areas for the VIGS students to solve in order to learn more about AI agents. After the session, VIGS convened for a social program with food and refreshments, as well as social activities like shuffleboard, pool and darts.

Research-based innovation highlights, user partner' status and focus areas, and scientific interaction

The conference's 1st day started out with a bang, with tons of exciting new work from across Visual Intelligence being presented. This included new research-based innovation highlights, which showcased the latest work and results from our innovation areas.

After a warm welcome by the VI Management Team, we kickstarted the conference with an invited talk by Tanja Danner, CEO of Prenaital, who presented the start-up's work on developing AI-powered solutions for detecting and reducing risk of pre-term birth.

The user partners updated the consortium on the status of current activities and achievements, as well as their focus areas going forward.

Jens Nørve, a KI Norge representative, gave an invited talk where he presented the organization's aims to support current and future AI development in Norway. The talk was followed by an interview session moderated by Associate Professor Elisabeth Wetzer.

The day was concluded with the VI Days poster session, featuring recently published reserach from the centre, and a dinner at the conference venue.

Collaborative work sessions and current trends in deep learning

The VI Days 2026 was concluded with an excellent 2nd day, starting off with a technical session Agentic AI, which included a broader introduction to the topic, a Q&A session about the technology, and VIGS student presentations detailing their experiences with agentic AI from the VI Days pre-program event.

The day also featured the Innovation Brewery Poster Challenge, which included flash tasls by student teams who pitche potential synergies across Visual Intelligence, with PhD Fellow Gabriel Yanci Arteaga receiving the award.

The researchers and partners convened for collaborative work sessions centered on the centre's user partners and innovation areas, allowing them to review the status of ongoing and planned activities at the centre. The day was concluded by a outlook on current trends in deep learning by Arnt Børre Salberg, Chief Research Scientist at the Norwegian Computing Center.

Thanks to our 100 attendees for two very productive days! We can't wait to gather the Visual Intelligence community again in 2027.