Speakers

Invited Speakers

AI Applications in Telenor, Massimiliano Ruocco, Telenor

Descriptions: AI is one of the fundamental technologies of the 21st century, and one of our goals is to make Telenor a data-driven AI company. In general we believe that AI must be used for a best society. That's why we established the Telenor-NTNU AI-lab at NTNU in 2017, now renamed to Norwegian Open AI Lab. We want to build national competence on AI, and by that contributing to the European community. In Analytics and AI group in Telenor Research we have been working across different problem domains such as networks, marketing, customer care, and IoT, with different types of data such as location data, CRM data, sensor data and text, and we use state of the art models such as deep learning and reinforcement learning. This talk will go through some of the main cases we have been working in such domain, and discuss the main possibilities of AI for a Telco company.

Automating the media supply chain, Johanna Björklund

Our media and communication infrastructures are being reconstructed to leverage advances in machine learning. The goal is to increase process automation, and have AI systems with a semantic, or human-like, understanding of media content take on previously manual tasks. In this talk, we give a series of examples of how new technology can be brought out from a lab environment and turned into useful tools for publishers and broadcasters.

About the speaker: Johanna Björklund is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computing Science at Umeå University. Her research is on semantic analysis of multimodal data, incorporating, e.g., images, audio, video, and text. She is also a co-founder of the IT companies Codemill, Adlede, and Accurate Player, which deliver products and services for the media supply chain and count ITV, BBC, and ProSieben among their customers.

Data and analytics in finance, Aria Rahmati, DNB

A financial organization such as DNB holds vast amount of financial data about their millions of customers. The amount has increased rapidly in the recent years. Especially, with customers adopting digital channels, more and more data of how customers interact with the bank is collected. This data is a massive asset for the banks, but owning data is not enough per se. Proper data preprocessing and modelling is required to exploit the true value of the data. This talk focuses on the practical side of data and analytics and walks through some of the applications and models that are currently used by DNB. In addition, it discusses why cutting-edge methods is not the main concern in practice, and what other important criteria are for implementing a model.

The really valuable AI problems in Industry, Trygve Karper, Cognite

While you as a consumer cruise around in a digital bliss, the industrial world is in many ways stuck in 1995. Massive efforts are currently underway to digitize industry. In fact, so much so that it is now common to talk about this as a fourth industrial revolution. It is clear that Big Data and AI technology will be a massive contributor to a successful revolution, but what are the areas where the real battle stands? In this talk, we will address the fundamental difficulties that the industry is facing and how new technology, as well as new ways of working, needs to be developed to succeed going forward. We will highlight some key differences between the consumer world and the industrial world and draw from that some key challenges that must be overcome to move forward. Moreover, we will also discuss some of the inherent difficulties with applying AI technology to physical systems and what it actually means to change how you work based on input from data driven processes.

About the speaker: Trygve Karper is VP of ML Engineering in Cognite. He has a mathematical background, with focus on partial differential equations and numerics, and has a PhD from UiO and been an Associated Professor at NTNU. Later he worked on simulation software for oil and gas. Having joined early in Cognite, he’s been a central driving force in Cognites data science journey - helping heavy asset industrial companies to digitalize.

Micro mobility and sharing economy, Marius Olsen, Urban Sharing

Cities are growing all over the world. New solutions for city life are popping up. Micro mobility is a key, new element combing mobility, sharing economy and high tech. The US Urban Sharing company this year made it to Newsweeks top 100 list of companies that try to make cities a better place to live.

Urban Sharing will now further develop and make sure that the platform that Norwegian city bike users know well, finds its way to new markets around the world. The company has already signed agreements in Stockholm and Edinburgh. The goal is to create a platform that can be adapted to several types of micro mobility anywhere in the world.

About the speaker: To head this work in Norway, Urban Sharing hired former Schibsted manager for tech trends, Marius Olsen, to make use of his proven founder interest and digital experience from the news media battleground which has seen struggles of digitalization for the last 25 years. Marius Olsen was educated at NTNU.

Successful applied AI in marketing, Freddy Aursø, Lighthouse8

Top trends for business success in 2020 will be customer experience and personalization. Lighthouse8 is internationally up front on these insights by utilising AI technology developed in cooperation with scientists at the NTNU.

This is about the combining of data at infrastructure level: taking data, applying business logic to insights gained from key data and delivering results back to customers and prospective clients. Being able to have data, clients, technology and UX people come together is key to becoming leaner, more responsive and more profitable. Tackling the challenges of man-machine interaction will be the strategic battleground for the future.

About the speaker: Freddy Aursø, gründer and CEO of Lighthouse8, has +15 years’ experience in the marketing and technology industry, working as a strategic advisor for companies such as Toyota, IKEA, eBay and hotels.com.

As founder and CEO at Lighthouse8, he is leading the strategic direction and operation of their teams in the European and APAC market. Before Lighthouse8, he was one of the co-founders of the global digital agency Digitas.