Open AI Days
Since its establishment in 2017, NAIL has organized several dissemination events that aim to spread knowledge about AI and inspire businesses and public sector organisations to collaborate with NTNU in AI research projects.
These events take place twice a year; in spring and autumn. In the spring semester, our partners can pitch potential master's thesis topics for our students and meet with supervisors at the Master Safari event. In autumn, we organize the best AI Master's Thesis Awards combined with a Workshop to shed light on what it takes to create a good master thesis project proposal.
An important objective for hosting these events is to provide an arena for connecting researchers, partners, and students, in order to exchange ideas and experiences regarding the many potential applications of AI.
Previous events
Master Safari 2024
Thanks to the super talented students from BRAIN NTNU, this year's Master Safari was a smashing success! The safari-element is the creative students' spin on our yearly master's thesis pitch event with partners of NorwAI and NAIL. A big thanks goes out to our partners who participated and told the students about the opportunity to work together with their company in next year’s master’s project. In the mingling area, students could meet representatives from our partners Aneo, NINA - Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Kartverket, SpareBank 1 SMN, Mia Health, Trondheim University Hospital and DNB.
We hope that all participants - both students, supervisors, and companies - had a fun and informative day with us in Gruva! We hope to see the projects come to fruition this fall!
The top AI theses of 2021 awarded
Artificial Intelligence is a popular topic among students at NTNU. In recent years, around 200 master’s theses in which AI plays a substantial part have been submitted yearly. On December 3rd, we celebrated the top AI theses of 2021 in an awards ceremony at Gløshaugen.
Sindre Stenen Blakseth, a 2021 graduate from the Department of Physics, was the lucky winner of the 2021 AI Master’s thesis awards.
Learn more about this year's AI Master's thesis awards by reading this article.
Inspirational Day and Master Thesis Awards, fall 2019
The 2019 AI Inspirational Day and Master Thesis Awards took place in Trondheim, October 24th.
The program included short AI talks - both on theory and application, given by researchers and industry. Three talented, former NTNU students (that you can see in the photo above) were awarded for the best master theses of 2019. You can find more photos from the event here.
Winners of the Master's Thesis Awards 2018
The winner of best master thesis in the category application, was Andreas Bell Martinsen, with the thesis End-to-end training for path following and control of marine vehicles, supervised by Anastasios Lekkas. In the photo above, you can see Andreas, together with Kerstin Bach and Massimiliano Ruocco.
The winners of best thesis in the category theoretical, were Are Haartveit and Harald Musum. Their thesis Learning event-driven time series with phased recurrent neural networks was supervised by Keith Downing.
NTNU AI Master's Thesis Awards 2022 and 2023
Every year we at the Norwegian Open AI Lab seek to encourage the hard work from our top tier students by awarding the Annual AI Master’s Thesis. This year, on January 24th, we awarded the top three theses from both 2022 and 2023. The awards ceremony was combined with a workshop for our partners, where students, supervisors and NAIL-partner representatives got to share their opinion on what makes a good master's thesis.
In the end, the two winners were Ellen Zhang Chang for 2022 with her thesis "Surrounding Dialogue Generation using Deep Learning with Adapters", and Michael Staff Larsen for 2023 for his thesis "Segmentation of Coronary Arteries using Transformers". Well done and congratulations!
In this article about the event you can read more about the program and the winners, and see more photos!
Master's thesis awards 2020
Artificial Intelligence is a popular topic among students at NTNU. In fact, more than 200 master's students who graduated from the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering last year submitted a thesis in which AI plays a substantial part. On December 15th, we celebrated the top AI theses of 2020 in a digital event.
Out of the 10 nominations, the evaluation committee selected the top three theses. The authors of these theses: Eivind Meyer, Herman Dieset and Amund Tenstad, were invited to present their work during the awards event, December 15. Eivind Meyer, a graduate from Department of Engineering Cybernetics, was the lucky winner. You can learn more about the event by reading this article.
Inspirational Day Spring 2019 Pre Event
In the evening of March 21, we organized a pre event where a few graduate students presented their master thesis work. The presentations had different topics, focusing on both theoretical and applied AI. All students did an impressive job and were able to engage the audience into lively discussions.
After the presentations, the discussions continued during a networking dinner, where researchers, participants from different companies and organizations, and the students were able to get to know each other.
Inspirational Day and Master's Thesis Awards, fall 2018
The Inspirational Day fall 2018, took place November 15 had two parts; the first part included presentations about AI research and on how to apply AI in industry and business. The second part was the Master Thesis Award, awarding the best AI master theses written at NTNU that year.
The event also provided great networking opportunities between students, researchers and others interested in AI.