2022 is all about growth for NorwAI - NorwAI expands with new partners and sectors

Language, energy, ethics have been NorwAI's main pillars since its inception in October 2020. For 2022 growth is evident as the industry consortium increases in numbers. Also research and innovation in the health sector are emerging as a possible new AI territory to further growth for NorwAI.

The research center is also involved in new international projects. NorwAI and the NTNU environment the center is a part of is proving itself as the country's largest "producer" of master's students and fellows in artificial intelligence.

There are many milestones for NorwAI in 2022. One was Statnett's entry as the 12th member of the company consortium.

- We want to join! declared Statnett's CEO Hilde Tonne when she met NorwAI's partners and the Norwegian AI community at the NorwAI Innovate conference in Trondheim recently.

The confirmation of NorwAI's new participant in the consortium came after a targeted process from the large Norwegian energy player and the research center. The green transition and the energy crisis in Europe have helped to strengthen and expand the relationship between the two. Ever since NorwAI was established, one of Statnett's researchers has held one of NorwAI's professor 2 positions. The collaboration between Statnett and NorwAI is now being further expanded with Statnett as a full partner among the other industrial locomotives in NorwAI.

Energy focus

And "energy" was one of the focal topics for this year's edition of the AI ​​conference NorwAI Innovate with more than 200 physical participants.

Statnett's presence was supplemented by important NorwAI partners such as Aneo, a “green” spinoff of TrønderEnergi, Aker company Cognite as well as newly established Aize, all of whom are heavy players in the sector. The conference also devoted a lot of attention to language models and personalization, to the social significance and dilemmas of digitization and a separate session on the status of Nordic AI work and the possibility of collaboration. The conference has in a short time established itself as the largest and most important conference of its kind for the Norwegian AI community.

Health is a possibility

Last year, Nobel Prize winner Edvard Moser at the Kavli Institute challenged NorwAI to interdisciplinary collaboration to explore synergies between brain research and artificial intelligence. In 2022, the two research centers have explored the possibilities between the physical and artificial world.

Several others have signed up to contribute to NorwAI's innovation resources. The biopharmaceutical giant Pfizer was present as an observer during this year's NorwAI Innovate and has invited NorwAI to a discussion meeting in London. Pfizer is seeking an independent research body to assist the company with personalization technologies.

Helse Midt-Norge has already a successful collaboration with the Open AI Lab at NTNU in diagnosing cerebral palsy in newborns with the help of AI. Recently, the health region's ICT arm Hemit HF granted funding for AI-supported research in breast cancer. The two parties are discussing possible projects to be assisted by NorwAI AI competence.

Language models

New, large language models will create a number of new, different business and everyday services. Securing national technological independence for language models is of strategic importance to Norway and the country's languages. The international technology giants today dominate the digital infrastructure for important social processes such as e.g. freedom of speech. These companies develop their services based on a few world languages. For example, many were excited by the American ChatGPT which was recently publicly launched.

But now smaller languages ​​such as Norwegian can also develop their own models based on access to national language sources. NTNU and the universities of Oslo and of Stavanger collaborate to achieve this goal. NorwAI is leading the way with its work with a GPT-2 model in close collaboration with partner Schibsted and, among others, Head of Schibsted's AI Enablement Program Simen Eide.

Nordic language models

NorwAI is in dialogue with the national initiative AI Sweden to establish collaboration at various levels with the joint ambition of further developing relations with other countries and environments in the Nordic region. Sweden is ahead of other Nordic countries in their GPT work and others can learn from Swedens work. At NorwAI Innovate, AI Sweden gave an in-depth presentation of its model GPT-3SWE to secure a national edition of language models.

Waterloo

Though the Nordics are vital to our language and personalization work, NorwAI also develops its activities and relations to countries outside Europe. In addition to a number of appearances at international conferences and the publication of articles, NorwAI together with partners Cognite, TrønderEnergi and SINTEF Digital have received support for an AI program with the renowned University of Waterloo in Toronto, Canada.

Social robots

NorwAI launched the social robot Kaia in 2021. In 2022, the robot is further trained. Kaia has become a regular at NorwAI's conferences where the robot presents itself with new features. The 2022 edition has become more complete with functionality in games and object recognition. NorwAI will continue the research on Social Robots. This semester three new research assistants have joined us and will develop new features and conduct extensive benchmarks to test Kaia against the state of the art.

Advise to Parlament and Government

The Norwegian Board of Technology who advises Parlament and Government on new technology, is currently analyzing speech technologies and their future significance for the Norwegian language. By the help of artificial intelligence (AI), machines are rapidly improving their abilities to speak, recognise and understand human language. They are also getting better at deducting information about us, such as age, height, and chronical diseases, based on how we speak.

NorwAI is a contributor to the analyses, which will probably result in several reports.

NorwAI Forum

The NorwAI center organized its first "NorwAI Forum", which was a gathering for all partners to share knowledge and discuss activities and results across work packages and focus areas. NorwAI Forum will be held twice a year and will mainly be held as a physical event, but with the possibility of hybrid participation, via an online link.

Through collaborative activities within the work package INNOECO – AI Innovation Ecosystems - innovation in NorwAI is facilitated. During the year, innovation workshops and seminars have been organized both across work packages and within partner clusters with common interests.

Research and innovation

The target is tangible innovations. The work package LAP (Language & personalization) is closing it gap to the goal. The work is picking up speed as data is getting more available through partners. NorwAI expects interesting testing results from training language models in the year to come which can prove valuable to media and finance partners.

On the industrial side hybrid digital twins, IoT censored anomalies detection, maintenance predictions and operational availability, knowledge graphs and trustworthy AI for safety applications have partner focus. The research involves companies in oil and gas developments, telecom, wind turbines and green energy operations and quality assurance.

Furthermore, the University of Oslo contributes to understand the social impact of AI by solution focus, and among others, achievements on contributing to conceptual innovation in the social studies of AI drawing on empirical case studies from NorwAI and beyond.

EU projects

NorwAI is engaged in three running EU projects and joined an application in Investigative journalism as a partner with AI Sweden. SINTEF’s partnership in NorwAI led to an invitation to take part in an INPART application on wind mills. SINTEF Digital is already partner in a UTFORSK-project on wind mills with USA, Canada, India and Norway. Other spin-offs include seven others national and international projects on multiple topics.

By the end of 2022, 27 key researchers were engaged at NorwAI. Three visiting researchers worked at NorwAI as well as 3 postdoctoral researchers with financial support from NorwAI and other sources.

NorwAI funds 8 PhDs plus another 14 PhDs working on projects in the center with financial support from other sources. In 2021-22 71 students took their master’s degrees at the center, while 45 students have ongoing projects to be finished in 2023.