Seminars
AI seminars
The NorwAI and NAIL AI Seminar Series is a series of events, open for all audiences. The seminars are usually hosted on Fridays at NTNU campus Gløshaugen, Trondheim, often with the option to join online via Teams. We seek to have about one seminar a month. If you have input for a topic or would like to hold a talk in the series yourself, please feel free to contact us.
The talks are sorted into three categories:
- Popular science
- Industrial applications
- Technical
Seminars 2024
- November 1 - AI and Language Technology, with Benjamin Kille and Torbjørn Svendsen
- November 15 - From Minds to Machines – Psychology-grounded AI, with Loïs Vanhée
- November 22 - AI and Elections, with Heidrun Åm
Schedule is subject to change. More information about each seminar will be posted in our channels continuously.
Previous seminars
Previous seminars and webinars, both organised with NorwAI and other collaborators, are listed below. You can also find the recordings of a selection of the webinars on our YouTube channel.
The seminar series is hosted by
With support from
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar, November 22 – "AI & Elections", with Heidrun Åm
With the recent election in the US unwanted democratic influence have been on everyone's mind. This year's final instalment in the NorwAI & NAIL AI Seminar Series featured a talk by Heidrun Åm, Professor in Sociology, at NTNU’s Department of Sociology and Political Science, titled "AI and elections". The hour in the AI lab was centered around the intersection of technology and democracy, with Heidrun presenting the work of an expert group established by the Norwegian government, where they map experiences from the 2024 elections regarding generative AI and how it challenges and impacts democratic processes, with special focus on unwanted influence. Based on this mapping they are going to provide recommendations on how Norway can prepare for the parliamentary election 2025.
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar - Advances in Collaborative Neurodynamic Optimization
On June 9, the seminar series featured a talk by Jun Wang, Professor at Department of Computer Science and School of Data Science City University of Hong Kong, titled "Advances in Collaborative Neurodynamic Optimization".
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar - The AI Privacy Problem
On Friday 27th January our AI seminar series with NorwAI was guested by Professor Marija Slavkovik from the University of Bergen. She gave a talk about AI and privacy, shedding light on some important issues and distinctions to consider when building algorithms that use sensitive information.
Marija has kindly agreed to share her PowerPoint slides with us. We would like to thank Marija so much for the visit and the great talk!
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar - Medical machine learning: from basic research to startups
Thank you so much to Lars Ailo Bongo, from UiT - Norges arktiske universitet, who gave a very interesting talk about the rollercoaster of failure and success that is medical machine learning!
Among other things, he stressed the importance of data availability and open access research. In the spirit of accessibility, he has kindly provided us with a link to view his presentation slides for those who are interested.
Also, a big thanks to Kerstin Bach for organising this edition of our AI seminar series with NorwAI.
Webinar - Explainable AI
Speakers: Anastasios Lekkas, Inga Strümke, Sindre Remman and Vilde Gjærum (all NTNU).
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
Webinar - Introduction to change detection
In this seminar, Martin Tveten from Norwegian Computing Center gives an introduction to change detection.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
NAIL & NORA.Startup webinar - Student-startup collaborations
In this webinar, we explored different examples and cases of student-startup collaborations within AI.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
Machine Learning and Visual Intelligence for decision support in healthcare and medical image analysis
In this webinar, Robert Jenssen gives a talk about AI in healthcare and medical image analysis. Robert is professor at the University of Tromsø, and head of the UiT Machine Learning Group.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
Optimization for Intelligent Mobility Systems: From Electric Racing to Sustainable Urban Mobility
Mauro Salazar, Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, gives a talk on optimisation for intelligent mobility systems.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
Kernel-based approaches to linear system identification
In this webinar, Gianluigi Pillonetto, Associate Professor at the University of Padova, gives a talk about kernel-based approaches to linear system identification.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
AI & Digital Ethics
This webinar on AI & Digital Ethics was recorded October 23, 2020. The speakers are Leonora Bergsjø, May Thorseth, Pinar Øzturk and Heri Ramampiaro. Trym Holter is leading the discussion.
You can watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar, November 1 – "AI and Language Technology", with Benjamin Kille and Torbjørn Svendsen
With the rise of chatbots and deep-faked voices, can we trust AI when it comes to language technology? This was what Assoc.Prof. Benjamin Kille and Prof. Torbjørn Svendsen tried to highlight when kickin off this fall's Seminar Series. The event featured two talks by Benjamin and Torbjørn, both from NTNU’s Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, shedding light on the state if the art within about both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Spoken language technology.
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar - Nothing to see here; is reproducibility even relevant for computer science?
On Friday March 15th we held our second instalment of the AI seminar series hosted with SFI NorwAI. Here, Odd Erik Gundersen, the Chief AI Officer at ANEO AS, told us more about the challenges of reproducibility within computer science. He introduced some of the common problems when trying to reproduce computer science articles such as missing data and documentation on how the data is used. He also highlighted the importance of sharing code, not just data to ensure the best chance at reproducibility within this field.
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar - Empowering News Summerization with Pre-trained Language Models
Given the advancements and widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other variations of large language models (LMs), we are witnessing significant progress in natural language understanding and generation. These LMs have revolutionized the way we interact with AI systems and have found applications in various domains. In this presentation, we explore the development of Norwegian Generative Language Model (NorGLM) on news summerization task. Especially, we will discuss their underlying architecture, training methodologies, and the data employed in their training. Furthermore, we uncover the limitations of our model, paving the way for future research endeavors.
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar - Small particles, big data: Machine learning at the Large Hadron Collider
Thanks to Steffen Mæland, associate professor at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and contributor to the ATLAS experiment at CERN, who gave a very exciting talk about the advantages and challenges they face using machine learning at the Large Hadron Collider.
He has kindly shared his slides from the talk with us here!
Machine Learning for contextual advertising
Armin Catovic from Schibsted, shares lessons learned from how the use of simple language models can be highly effective in generating value in contextual advertising products
Watch the talk on our YouTube channel.
Toward More Natural Interactions with Conversational Recommender Systems
Krisztian Balog, Professor at the University of Stavanger/Adjunct professor at NTNU.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
Building trust in autonomous mobility systems
Øyvind Smogeli gives a talk about how to build trust in autonomous mobility systems. Øyvind is CTO and Co-founder at Zeabuz. He also holds a position as adjunct professor at the Department of Marine Technology, NTNU.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
The Norwegian regional stochastic model of the Covid-19 epidemics
Arnoldo Frigessi, Professor at the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Oslo, talks about the statistical modelling of the Norwegian Covid19 epidemics.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
Natural Language Processing in Norwegian
In this webinar, Erik Velldal, Associate Professor at the University of Oslo, gives an update on the current status of Natural Language Processing for Norwegian language.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
AI & ML in healthcare
This webinar covers applications of AI and ML techniques in video capsule endoscopy, skin lesion segmentation and classification, as well as developing AI to provide decision support to doctors working to identifying Inner Bowel Syndrome (IBS). The speaker is Sule Yayilgan, associate professor at NTNU.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar - Scientific Machine Learning: Bridging Domain Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Industrial Transition
For the final seminar series event of the season, we were visited by Professor Idelfonso Nogueira and Postdoc Vinicius Santana. They spoke about the recent advances in machine learning, and how they have catalyzed innovations across various sectors. How can ML effectively combine process systems' domain knowledge to ensure reliable and safe applications? In the second part of the seminar, they demonstrated these concepts and their implementation in the Julia language.
Thank you to everyone that showed up, and thank you for the engangement in the seminar series this spring! We look forward to more exciting speakers in the fall!
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar - Assembling doughnuts in the brain from parts
On Friday May 24th we held our newest instalment of the AI seminar series hosted with SFI NorwAI. This time around we met Benjamin Dunn, Associate Professor in (Neural) Data Science at the Department of Mathematics at NTNU, who spoke about a recent development involving neural representations that often take nice shapes such as circles and tori - or donuts! Thank you so much to Ben, and to the eager audience!
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar - Life after PhD, Failtastic!
The third instalment of this year's Seminar series, had Pål Haugen as a guest lecturer. Pål is a product developer at Furuno Norway and researcher in the DeepInMotion project here at NTNU. In his talk he high-lighted the fine line between being a seller and a scientist when working as a computer scienctist in the private sector. Pål encouraged the audience to embrace the insecurity, fight the loneliness, and have a mindset of "Sail to Fail" - because even when you fail spectacularly you will still learn something valuable from the experience.
Revitalizing the NAIL & NorwAI Seminar series
Last Friday, on March 1st, we kicked-off the NAIL & NorwAI AI Seminar series, with a talk from Professor Keith Downing. Keith talked us through some of the potential treaths we face within the current AI spring and the years to follow. The seminar start was a success, seeing a total of around 90 participants online and in person. We look forward to the next seminar, on March 15th, when Odd Erik Gundersen, Associate Professor at NTNU and Chief AI Officer at Aneo AS, is giving his talk "Nothing to see here; is reproducibility even relevant for computer science?". See more info on Odd Eriks talk here. Hope to see you there or online!
NorwAI&NAIL AI Seminar - Opting out of facial recognition
On Monday March 20th, we had the pleasure of hearing Professor Gavin Taylor, from the US Naval Academy talk about our possibilities of opting out of facial recognition. The underlying conclusion was that LowKey can make facial recognition systems misbehave and still have the image look very similar to the human eye. However, the issue might lie in implementing this service in practise in an increasingly digital and photographed world.
You can read their paper “LowKey: Leveraging Adversarial Attacks to Protect Social Media Users from Facial Recognition” here and also test LowKey in their online interface here. The slides from his presentation is also available here for those interested.
Thanks to all participants for the great turnout and interesting discussions following his talk!
Developing complex but trustworthy computing systems with Artificial Intelligence
The speakers are Ole Jakob Mengshoel (NTNU) & Ritchie Lee (NASA Ames Research Center).
Watch the talk on our YouTube channel.
Audio, sound and AI - NAIL & NORA.Startup webinar
In this webinar, we hear from three exciting AI startups working in the domain of sound, audio and video: Neat, Nomono, and Soundsensing.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
Machine ethics
Marija Slavkovik, Professor at the University of Bergen, gives a talk on Machine Ethics. This webinar was co-organised with NORA- the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
Towards Robust Vision-Based Voice Activity Detection
In this webinar Kalin Stefanov from Monash University gives a talk about robust vision-based voice activity detection.
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.