Starting today in Trondheim, + 200 professionals and academics met for a lunch-to-lunch conference program on artificial intelligence by NorwAI. Topics range from the green shift in energy, language and personalization technologies to robots and internett impact, including a session on Nordic collaboration.  15 invited national and international key note speakers and plentyful of poster-, demo and hackathon works by students and companies in seven in-depth sessions awaited the audience at the most important AI conference in Norway. 

CEO Hilde Tonne emphazised the effect of AI and digitalization for the future green shift as she opened the Innovate conference on November 1st.

Statnett is playing an important role for the future electricity infrastructure to meet the energy crisis in Europe.  Energy is a main focus at NorwAi Innovate. 

NorwAI Achievements detailed use cases and results from collaboration between NorwAI and industry partners after two years of research and innovation actions at the research center. 

Executive director Shimon Yoshida, (right) head of International Labeling Group, Pfizer, visited NTNU recently. AI and labels are connected:  - Broadly there are two areas of interest around labeling and AI: firstly using AI to facilitate production of the label (internal processes), and secondly using AI to transform how information is communicated to patients and healthcare professionals (of which the label is a part), Shimon Yoshida stated. 

Also participating (from left) NorwAI head Jon Atle Gulla, NorwAI program manager Kerstin Bach and NorwAI Work Package Leader for AI Innovation Ecosystem Nhien Nguyen.

Magnus Sahlgren, research head of AI Swedens NLU program, will organize a Nordic meeting on large language models with a few selected participants from the Nordic countries later in November.

Among those invited from Norway are University of Oslo and NorwAI who collaborate on building the premier large Norwegian language model for future services. 

The Research Council of Norway (RCN) made an site visit to NorwAI  as part of the contractual follow-up of the research centre in October.  The NorwAI visit was one of the last of the 22 SFIs awarded for the 2020-2028 period to report. 

The purpose of the visit was for the RCN to review the centre’s work to date, and to discuss challenges NorwAI encountered in the first two years of its operation. A report from the status of the SFIs is to be published soon. 

Front row at picture: Tarjei Nødtvedt Malme, Pål Malm, Liv Jorunn Jenssen (all NRC), Karolina Storesund and Nhien Nguyen (both NTNU), Back row: Kjetil Nørvåg (NTNU), Jon Atle Gulla (NTNU), Arne Berre (SINTEF),  David Baumgartner (Phd student NTNU) and Kenth Engø-Monsen (Telenor). 

The SFI Centre

The Research Council of Norway administers a number of funding schemes to promote excellence in research. One of them is the SFI (Centre for Research-based Innovation) scheme. Its main objective is to develop expertise in fields of importance for innovation and value creation. The SFI program requires that centres carry out high-quality research relevant to their end-user partners but makes those partners responsible for turning that research into innovations that deliver societal value that draws, as necessary, on the centre through such mechanisms as industrial PhDs and associated projects. This is unusual in national competence centre schemes; Norway is taking a leading role in this form of innovation and value creation.

NTNU SFI engagement 

NTNU is currently hosting 12 SFIs, and is a partner in another 14 SFIs, many of them hosted by NorwAI partner SINTEF.