NAIS - Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society

Dissertation Award 2025: Weronika Łajewska

The Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society is pleased to announce that the 2025 NAIS Dissertation Award is awarded to Weronika Łajewska for her PhD thesis Grounded and Transparent Response Generation for Conversational Information-Seeking Systems. The dissertation was supervised by Krisztian Balog from the University of Stavanger. Łajewska’s dissertation addresses a central challenge in modern AI systems: how conversational agents based on large language models can provide answers that are not only fluent but also reliable, grounded, and transparent to users. As conversational interfaces increasingly replace traditional search systems, users lose many of the cues, such as source links, that previously helped them assess the credibility and completeness of information. Her work develops new methods and evaluation frameworks to ensure that conversational systems can communicate uncertainty, provide evidence for their responses, and better support users in assessing the trustworthiness of generated answers.  The thesis takes a comprehensive approach to conversational information-seeking systems. It combines reproducibility studies, user-centered evaluation, dataset creation, and novel system design to advance the state of the art. Among its contributions are new datasets and annotation resources for studying answerability and response completeness, a method for detecting unanswerable questions, and GINGER, a modular retrieval-augmented generation framework that produces grounded Read more

By Kerstin Bach, ago

Call for NAIS Dissertation Awards 2025

The Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society (NAIS) invites nominations for dissertation award 2025. Doctoral theses that are defended after December 1, 2024, and until December 31, 2025, in the general area of ​Artificial Intelligence are eligible for submission. The winner of the dissertation award will be invited to give a talk at the Scandinavian AI Conference (SCAI) and will receive a support letter from NAIS when submitted to the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) Dissertation Awards. To be considered, a dissertation must be nominated by the thesis supervisor. The selection of the winner will be based on the quality and impact of work, and the quality of writing. Work that has been published in conferences or journals, and that primarily attributed to the student’s initiative will be considered favorably.  Nominations must be submitted as a single PDF file through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=naisda2025 Submission guidelines can be found below. The NAIS Board will appoint the NAIS Dissertation Award Committee.  Important Dates Submission deadline: 27 February 2026 Notifications: March 2026 Submission Guidelines *To register as a member of NAIS, send an email to membership@aisociety.no. The membership fee is 400 NOK per year. Past winners of the NAIS Dissertation Awards 2023 winner of the Read more

By Kerstin Bach, ago

Call for Papers: SCAI 2026 in Odense, Denmark June 15-16, 2026

The Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) is a recurring forum that brings together researchers and practitioners working in artificial intelligence across Scandinavia and beyond. Hosted by the SDU Applied AI and Data Science group at the University of Southern Denmark, the conference aims to foster collaboration between academia, industry, and the public sector, and to showcase high-quality research in applied and foundational AI. SCAI provides a venue for presenting ongoing research, discussing emerging challenges and opportunities in AI, and strengthening the Scandinavian AI community through networking and interdisciplinary exchange. Contributions are welcome from all areas of Artificial Intelligence, including (but not limited to): The conference particularly encourages submissions from early-stage researchers and PhD students, and seeks contributions that combine strong methodological foundations with real-world relevance. For more information about SCAI, upcoming events, and call for papers, please visit the SCAI webpage:https://www.sdu.dk/en/forskning/sdu_applied_ai_and_data_science/scai. The conference proceedings will be published in the Springer CCIS series which are approved as a scientific publication channel at level 1 in Norway.

By Kerstin Bach, ago

NAIS 2025 Recap: An insightful and collaborative event

More than 50 attendees from the Norwegian AI research community gathered in Tromsø, Norway for two days of insightful presentations, interactive technical sessions, and scientific and social interactions. by Petter Bjørklund, Communications Advisor at SFI Visual Intelligence – blog post is republished from SFI Visual Intelligence The aim of the 2025 Norwegian AI Society (NAIS) Symposium was to bring together AI researchers and practitiners from Norway and Scandinavia to present ongoing work and discuss future directions of artificial intelligence (AI). This year’s event was jointly organized by NAIS, SFI Visual Intelligence, and The UiT Machine Learning Group. After a light lunch and warm welcome by organizers Kerstin Bach and Robert Jenssen, the event kicked off with a stimulating Day 1 program, featuring a keynote by Visual Intelligence PI Elisabeth Wetzer, three technical sessions, the Dissertation Award 2024 presentation, and a refreshing symposium dinner at Maskinverkstedet. Wetzer’s keynote gave the attendees an overview of commonly used techniques from classic image analysis and learning-based approaches, their limitations, and how to efficiently combine tools from both worlds. The technical sessions featured both full papers and position papers on different topics related to AI, such as visual question answering, AI for digitalized carbon storage, and Read more

By Kerstin Bach, ago

Dissertation Award 2024: Mina Young Pedersen

The Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society is pleased to announce that the 2024 NAIS Dissertation Award is awarded to Mina Young Pedersen for her PhD thesis Malicious Agents and the Power of Few: On the Logic of Abnormality in Social Networks. The dissertation was supervised by Thomas Ågotnes and Marija Slavkovik from the University of Bergen, and Sonja Smets from the University of Amsterdam (NL). Dr. Pedersen’s dissertation is situated in the field of logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning, one of the foundational areas of Artificial Intelligence. Her work exemplifies the interdisciplinary character of the field, drawing on computer science, formal logic, and social science to explore urgent contemporary questions: How can we formally reason about malicious agents in social networks? And how can such reasoning be implemented computationally? These questions are particularly timely, as the need to understand and mitigate the influence of malicious actors in digital systems has never been more pressing. At the same time, the thesis contributes to deepening our understanding of the logical foundations of AI systems. The thesis stood out in the review process for several reasons: One of its most compelling qualities is the originality of its perspective. Although the use of formal logic Read more

By Kerstin Bach, ago

Call for Papers: 2025 NAIS Symposium on June 18-19 @ UiT

The 2025 Symposium of the Norwegian AI Society will take place from June 18 – 19 at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. The symposium aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of artificial intelligence from Norway and Scandinavia to present ongoing work and discuss the future directions of AI. With the symposium, NAIS provides a forum for networking among researchers and building links with related research fields, practitioners, and businesses.   For more information: webpage of the symposium | UiT press release Important Dates: Contributions are welcome from all areas of Artificial Intelligence, and topics of interest include but are not limited to: We welcome full papers and position papers. Full papers should be written in English, formatted according to the CEUR Workshop Proceedings style, and not exceed 10 pages plus bibliography. Position papers must not exceed 4 pages, and they should relate to ongoing research but can also present work that has been presented elsewhere. Please state clearly where the paper was presented. Position papers will be presented by the authors alongside regular papers. Selected papers will be invited for an oral or poster presentation. We highly encourage early-stage researchers and PhD students to submit Read more

By Kerstin Bach, ago

Call for EurAI Fellows 2025 

Nominations are sought for EurAI Fellows 2025.  Nominees should be persons that have achieved exceptional distinction in AI in Europe. The distinction may be evidenced in several ways — fellows’ accomplishments range from pioneering advances in the theory of AI to unusual achievements in AI technology and applications. Leadership in EurAI or EurAI member societies, support of forums for the exchange of ideas, and exceptional service for the international AI community will also be considered in the selection process. The EurAI Fellows program was initiated in 1999 to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe. The EurAI Fellows Program honors only a tiny percentage of the total membership of all EurAI member societies (up to a maximum of 3%). Each Fellow will receive a Certificate signed by the EurAI Chair. The names of the recently elected Fellows are published each year on the EurAI Webpages and in the EurAI Bulletin. At each ECAI conference, a Fellows lunch will be sponsored by EurAI to honor the recently elected Fellows. Who is Eligible to Be a EurAI Fellow? Candidates must be current members of NAIS. Usually, only individuals who have contributed to Read more

By Kerstin Bach, ago

Call for Dissertation Awards 2024

Call for Nominations The Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society (NAIS) invites nominations for dissertation awards in 2024. Doctoral theses that are defended after December 1, 2023, and until December 31, 2024, in the general area of ​Artificial Intelligence are eligible for submission. The winner of the dissertation awards will be invited to give a talk at the NAIS Symposium and will receive a support letter from NAIS when submitted to the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) Dissertation Awards. To be considered, a dissertation must be nominated by the thesis supervisor. The selection of the winner will be based on the quality and impact of work, and the quality of writing. Work that has been published in conferences or journals and that is primarily attributed to the student’s initiative will be considered favorably.  Nominations must be submitted as a single PDF file through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=naisda_2024 The NAIS Board will appoint the NAIS Dissertation Award Committee.  Important Dates Submission Guidelines *To register as a member of NAIS, send an email to membership@aisociety.no. The membership fee is 400 NOK per year. Past winners On the EurAI website you can find past winners of the EurAI Dissertation Awards : Previous winners NAIS Dissertation Award: Read more

By Kerstin Bach, ago

Dissertation Award 2023: Daniel Johansen Trosten

The Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society presents the NAIS Dissertation Award to Daniel Johansen Trosten for his PhD thesis Improving Representation Learning for Deep Clustering and Few-shot Learning. The thesis was supervised by Michael C. Kampffmeyer at the University in Tromsø. Dr. Trosten studied two areas of deep learning that deal with limited data. First, he explored how to improve the quality of representations learned in deep clustering, especially for complex data with multiple views. Second, he investigated few-shot learning, where models learn from very few examples. The focus was on the role of the geometrical shape of the data representation in this context. Many recent methods use a specific shape called a hypersphere, and Trosten aimed to understand why this is a good choice for few-shot learning tasks. The thesis stood out because the work delves into critical aspects like representational alignment and the geometry of embeddings, leading to groundbreaking and state-of-the-art approaches in both domains. The impact is evident not only in the impressive number of publications in top conferences and journals – including first-authored works at Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) and International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) – but also in the significant citations Read more

By Kerstin Bach, ago

Call for Papers: SCAI 2024: University of Jönköping

The Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), now in its 14th year, is set to unfold on the 10th and 11th of June 2024 at Jönköping University in Sweden. SCAI 2024 invites the academic and industrial communities to submit papers and attend this prominent event, which aims to showcase the latest advancements and research in Artificial Intelligence. Open Call for Papers Researchers and practitioners are encouraged to submit their papers for consideration. SCAI 2024 is looking for original contributions in a broad range of AI topics. The submission guidelines and procedures are detailed on the conference website. This is an excellent opportunity to contribute to the body of knowledge in AI and to collaborate with peers from various sectors. Submission and Registration Key Dates Accepted papers will be published and acknowledged at Level 1, providing authors with a prestigious platform for their research. Registration The registration for SCAI 2024 is now open: https://ju.se/samarbeta/event-och-konferenser/konferens/scai-symposium-2024/registration.html Joint Organization for Broader Impact In a show of unity and shared vision, the Norwegian AI Society (NAIS) and the Swedish AI Society (SAIS) are jointly organizing the event. This partnership is indicative of the collaborative spirit that drives the AI community forward. Networking Opportunities and Beyond Read more

By Massimiliano Ruocco, ago