Daniel Johansen Trosten defended his PhD thesis “Improving Representation Learning for Deep Clustering and Few-shot Learning” on August 23rd 2023 at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
Daniel Johansen Trosten defended his PhD thesis “Improving Representation Learning for Deep Clustering and Few-shot Learning” on August 23rd 2023 at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
Summary of thesis:
The amounts of data in the world have increased dramatically in recent years, and it is quickly becoming infeasible for humans to label all these data. It is therefore crucial that modern machine learning systems can operate with few or no labels.The introduction of deep learning and deep neural networks has led to impressive advancements in several areas of machine learning. These advancements are largely due to the unprecedented ability of deep neural networks to learn powerful representations from a wide range of complex input signals. This ability is especially important when labeled data is limited, as the absence of a strong supervisory signal forces models to rely more on intrinsic properties of the data and its representations.
This thesis focuses on two key concepts in deep learning with few or no labels. First, we aim to improve representation quality in deep clustering - both for single-view and multi-view data. Current models for deep clustering face challenges related to properly representing semantic similarities, which is crucial for the models to discover meaningful clusterings. This is especially challenging with multi-view data, since the information required for successful clustering might be scattered across many views. Second, we focus on few-shot learning, and how geometrical properties of representations influence few-shot classification performance. We find that a large number of recent methods for few-shot learning embed representations on the hypersphere. Hence, we seek to understand what makes the hypersphere a particularly suitable embedding space for few-shot learning.
Evaluation Committee:
- Professor Klaus-Robert Müller, Technical University of Berlin, Germany (1. Opponent)
- Professor Anne H Schistad Solberg, Institute for Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway (2. Opponent)
- Professor Fred Godtliebsen, Department of Mathematics and Statistics (internal member and leader of the committee)
Supervisors:
- Associate Professor Michael Kampffmeyer, Department of Physics and Technology, UiT (main supervisor)
- Professor Robert Jenssen Department of Physics and Technology, UiT (co-supervisor)
- Researcher Sigurd Løkse, Department of Physics and Technology, UiT(co-supervisor)
The Defense was led by Professor John Sigurd Mjøen Svendsen, Pro-Dean at the Faculty of Science and Technology at UiT.
The Visual Intelligence Annual Report 2025, highlighting the centre's progress, activities, achieved innovations, staff, funding, and publications for 2025, is now available to read on our websites.
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Congratulations to Centre Director Robert Jenssen, who received UiT's Research and Development Award at the university's annual celebration.
Visual Intelligence researchers contributed to the Pioneer Centre for AI workshop on Electronic Health Records research. The aim was to strengthen ties between the two centres on EHR-related research.
Tre av studentene i sivilingeniør i Kunstig Intelligens ved UiT skal delta i NM i KI. Slik gikk det da de ble intervjuet ved hjelp av kunstig intelligens (News article on nordlys.no).
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Rami Al-Belmpeisi is a PhD Research Fellow in the Visual Computing section at DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark. He visited Visual Intelligence in Tromsø from November 2025 to February 2026.
Visual Intelligence researchers came to the UiT Open Day to inform the students about UiT's study programme, and inspire them to pursue AI-related studies and career paths.
Congratulations to our colleague Michael Kampffmeyer, who received the Fridtjof Nansen Prize for Young Researchers in 2026.
We happily welcome Rahul Baburajan as a new PhD Research Fellow at SFI Visual Intelligence's hub in Tromsø.
Congratulations to our colleague Sarina Thomas, who has been recognized as one of Norway's Top 50 Women in Tech!
Elisabeth Wetzer forsker på hvordan maskiner kan lære å analysere medisinske bilder – og samtidig forstå hva legene faktisk ser etter (Norwegian news article on dagsavisen.no)
Visual Intelligence researchers organized a preparatory course for UiT AI students who are attending this year's Norwegian AI Championship.
We happily welcome Veronica Lachi and Qing Liu as new Associate Professors at SFI Visual Intelligence.
Artur Radzivil is a PhD Research Fellow at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. He visited Visual Intelligence in Oslo from September to November 2025.
Congratulations to Marius Aasan, who successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Oslo on February 10th.
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.