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 machine ethics.

This year’s Dissertation Award 2024 presentation was given by Mina Young Pedersen—Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam and the Dissertation Award 2024 winner. Her thesis—titled “Malicious Agents and the Power of Few: On the Logic of Abnormality in Social Networks”—draws on computer science, formal logic, and social science to explore urgent questions, such as how can we formally reason about malicious agents in social networks, and how can such reasoning be implemented computationally.

The second and final day of the symposium maintained Day 1’s high caliber with a stimulating program, including keynotes by Professors J. S. Marron and Keith Downing, the NAIS general assembly, the final technical session, and the NAIS poster session. 

Marron’s keynote discussed Data Integration via Analysis of Subspaces (DIVAS). DIVAS improves earlier methods using a novel random direction approach to statistical inference, and by treating partially shared blocks. Its usefulness was illustrated using mortality, cancer and neuroimaging data sets. Downing’s keynote explored the origins and anatomy of natural and artificial neural networks as predictive mechanisms.

The NAIS poster session featured recently published work on different aspects on AI—offering an interactive venue for sharing the latest AI research.

Organizers Kerstin Bach and Robert Jenssen thank all who came to Tromsø to present ongoing work and discuss future directions in artificial intelligence.

“It was a delight to host, interact and learn with the Norwegian AI research community here at UiT. I wish to thank the organizing committee, the invited speakers, and session chairs for contributing to a very successful event!,” Jenssen says.

“We were happy to once again gather our Norwegian AI colleagues! This year’s symposium has been a great platform for seeing what the Norwegian AI research community is currently working on and for discussing recent AI-related work in Norway,” Bach adds.