My return to old halls
My return to old halls
EVP Data & Tech, Schibsted ASA
It’s been an honour to be a part of the establishment of NorwAI - one of Norway’s largest efforts within AI. AI is truly a transformative technology long in the making, that now is impacting consumers and societies every day, every hour - many times without us knowing it.
It’s easy to identify when you add a cool Snapchat filter on a Friday evening - but really difficult to identify when a bank is parsing your transaction records for fraudulent activities. And we´ve just seen the beginning.
As a former computer science student from NTNU, it’s been great to return to the same halls.
For me personally, as a former computer science student from NTNU, it’s been great to return to the same halls again. See young students flowing to subjects previously known by the few. An international environment working on solving the problems tomorrow - relentlessly fuelled with coffee in paper cups from the SIT canteen.
What is especially interesting with NorwAI and the SFI setup, is that we focus on getting innovations into production together with our partners.
Matching the needs and ideas of the industry partners with the scientific power of NTNU and the greater scientific community in Norway, is essential for Norway’s ability to compete in an increasingly technology dependent market for all industries. And for a small country like
Norway - some of these are problems that are impossible to solve alone.
We need compute power yet to be activated on Norwegian soil.
An example is building a really good Norwegian language model. We are planning to gather data from the companies that produce large amounts of Norwegian content - Schibsted, NRK and its likes - and utilize Norway’s super-computers to generate a GPT-2 language model.
It’s not done overnight - and we need compute power yet to be activated on Norwegian soil. But as for all our activities, we will do it in NorwAI together - the industrial partners and NTNU - with the support of Forskningsrådet.
2020 was the beginning of a journey for NorwAI - we’re all looking forward to the first results!
NorwAI FTW!