Robert Jenssen at the opening of SFI Visual Intelligence. PHOTO: JONATAN OTTESEN / UIT
The official opening of SFI Visual Intelligence was successfully arranged as a digital event today. We are now ready to commence our research and innovation to tackle some of the large challenges in deep learning and AI, along with our partners.
The new Center for research-based innovation, Visual Intelligence, was officially opened today. The center researches artificial intelligence in close collaboration with business and health trusts, and will develop future solutions with a budget of NOK 300 million.
The UiT Machine Learning group and its research environment has been given the status of Center for Research-based Innovation (SFI) - with an allocation of up to NOK 96 million over eight years from the Research Council of Norway. With the support of their user partners, they have a total of NOK 294 million to develop artificial intelligence and image analysis for the future. On Thursday 14 January, they marked the opening of the new SFI with a digital event.
- Starting Visual Intelligence is something we have been looking forward to with great joy and enormous enthusiasm, says center leader and professor at UiT Robert Jenssen.
We have assembled a team of outstanding researchers and partners from academia, business and the public sector. The interdisciplinary approach and our complementary areas of expertise are a key to success, says center leader and professor Robert Jenssen.
UiT's rector Anne Husebekk had the honor of opening the center.
- I am incredibly proud to open a new SFI under the auspices of UiT, says Husebekk.
She talks about the technological development that has taken place since she started as a young researcher in medicine, and studied one cell at a time. At the end of her research career, eight years ago, it was possible to study millions of cells at once.
- And if you can then see millions of cells in many different experiments at once using images from artificial intelligence, you will see something completely different! It is the main point that makes machine learning and artificial intelligence so useful - it is a field of research that adds to usability, both in medicine and many other areas, says Rector Husebekk.
Visual Intelligence will further develop the field of visual intelligence - deep learning from images by artificial neural networks - beyond what is possible with current technology. The approach to the center is interdisciplinary and will create value across innovation areas where analysis of complex image data will have great utility value.
The center will develop better tools for, among other things, detecting heart disease and cancer, monitoring and detecting natural resources such as fish stocks, and monitoring the environment and climate, risks and potential natural disasters. The activities will thus contribute to solving important societal challenges related to health, resource management and environmental and climate monitoring.
Analysis and image data bring the different innovation areas together.
- The analysis methodology we develop in one area can often be useful in other innovation areas. For example, a method for finding cancerous tumors in the body with artificial intelligence could also be used to categorize fish species, says the center's leader, Robert Jenssen.
- With the new status as SFI, we can continue to be a leader nationally and internationally in this type of research, in collaboration with our research partners, the Norwegian Computing Center and the University of Oslo, says Jenssen.
Jenssen heads the center together with the co-directors Line Eikvil and Anne Solberg at the Norwegian Computing Center and the University of Oslo, respectively.
The center is a consortium of major players as its user partners, which cover a wide range of private and public sectors. The University Hospital in Northern Norway, the Norwegian Cancer Registry, GE Vingmed Ultrasound and Helse Nord IKT represent the health field. Equinor covers the energy field and the Institute of Marine Research represents the marine. Within Earth observation, the partners are KSAT and the company Terratec.
- With the help of this special composition of partners, we get close to the issues that are important for these major partners. Through close collaboration, we learn to know their challenges and understand more easily how we can develop solutions they need, says Jenssen.
Media contact person on the occasion of the opening of Visual Intelligence: Robert Jenssen.
Visual Intelligence had the great pleasure of hosting professor Jose Principe from the University of Florida for a 3-day visit in Tromsø June 29 - July 1, 2022.
The workshop brought together partners from the Cancer Registry and the University Hospital of North Norway, as well as researchers from the wider consortium.
Srishti Gautam, PhD student in Visual Intelligence, at UiT received the Best Poster award at the NORA annual conference 2022
Director Robert Jenssen gave the keynote "Visual Intelligence advances deep learning research towards innovations" at the 2022 Norwegian AI Society Conference (NAIS) in Oslo.
PhD candidate at UiT Kristoffer Wickstrøm gives invited tutorial at the 2022 Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society (NAIS) Conference in Oslo.
Visual Intelligence had the great pleasure of hosting a school class from Kongsbakken VGS in Tromsø on April 20th 2022.
We invited companies, the public sector, and other organizations to present their ideas for master’s projects and to connect with students having an interest and background in computer science and machine learning.
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Director Robert Jenssen gave a talk about explainable AI connected to the overarching theme of the Aim North conference, namely Ethics in AI. The talk outlined e.g. VI's recent results on detecting artifacts in medical images by our "Prototypical Relevance Propagation" method.
The Pioneer AI Centre is Denmark's flagship centre on AI, headed by prof. Serge Belongie, University of Copenhagen/KU. The official opening of the centre took place March 28 2022 at the "Black Diamond" in Copenhagen city centre.
New project associated with Visual Intelligence on reduce bottlenecks related to uncertainty estimates in classification by a combined statistical and machine learning approach. The project is on recognition of specific objects at and within the seabed from several image types.
The Visual Intelligence Graduate School (VIGS) will be an important component in the NORA research school and Visual Intelligence's Northern Lights Deep Learning (NLDL) conference will be a venue for winter school activities within this nation-wide initiative.
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Visual Intelligence is happy to be a partner in a newly funded Horizon Europe project on AI-supported picture analysis within healthcare!
Associate Professor Cristina Soguero-Ruiz visited Tromsø and gave a very interesting talk on March 17th 2022 on how to exploit AI and machine learning for medical image analysis and healthcare applications.
Through the ongoing Akademia Avtale fund between Equinor and UiT. The goal is to develop new innovative approaches for combining image data and other sources of information in the context of wind energy.
Beslutninger gjort av algoritmer gir oss problemer med uforståelige forklaringer.
The "Visual Intelligence days" is coming up shortly, and VI-collaborators will gather in Oslo to connect and share knowledge. Phd-students and early career researchers will also gather one day in advance to socialize. Please see the updated program.
The paper review some recent advances in developing machine learning methods for marine science applications in Norway. It is published in the Journal of Ocean Technology 2021.