These consumer-marketed AI algorithms rely on years and decades of research and technological development. While we are in the very beginning of consumer market AI, we are still in the early days of witnessing the deployment of larger algorithms, and we do not yet fully understand the consequences. There are many ways such powerful tools could be used for both good and bad. It is therefore good to know that in 2023 we will have a Center of Excellence at UiB that will investigate new forms of digital narratives in electronic literature, digital games, social media and AI-driven storytelling. It is called The Center for Digital Narratives. Not to mention Integreat, the Centre of Excellence that will be launched at UiO. Integreat has amission of radically transforming machine learning by exploiting knowledge together with data to make methods that are more accurate, sustainable, trustworthy and explainable. Congratulations to Jill and Scott Retterberg at UiB, and Arnoldo Frigessi and Ingrid Glad at UiO. It will be truly exciting to follow these centers!
NORA as a network has grown substantially in 2022, and in 2023 we will focus on consolidating much of the activity started in 2022. The NORA Norwegian AI Research School is of particular importance. I am also looking forward to making many of the AI algorithms used by NORA consortium partners, available to the larger research community, and also to industry, public sector and SMBs, through the European Digital Innovation Hub NEMONOOR. NORA.startup is an important part of the Norwegian AI ecosystem, and we will continue connecting our partners to industry and the public sector. We will support them in building strong consortia and EU applications within our EU network for AI. And, not to forget, together with project owner UiO and other partners, we will in 2023 start building the Norwegian AI Cloud – a national infrastructure for AI.
NORA has become a strong network hosting and supporting many conferences, workshops and meetings. Particularly, we have created an important Nordic platform for young researchers through the NordicAImeetconference, and I am excited that The Pioneer Centre for AI in Denmark has taken the initiative to host this conference next year in Copenhagen, making it “truly Nordic”.
On an international scale, we will continue to build strong international relations with the National Labs of Department of Energy (USA), with The Alan Turing Institute (UK) and with HIDA Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy (Germany). Norway, as the first country outside UK, will from January be able to send Norwegian Ph.D students to the UK to follow The Alan Turing Institute’s Enrichment Scheme, and we will also exchange several students with German institutions through HIDA.
I believe we are extremely lucky to be living in such an exciting time for research and development of intelligent algorithms and machines. NORA is all about building a strong AI community in Norway. I am therefore so happy to see that almost all prominent universities and institutes are now sharing this common vision. Through collaboration, we will achieve a lot within the field of AI in Norway!
I wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year! Remember that Santa will visit everyone publishing their research in an open and free journal like Nordic Machine Intelligence! (Yes, we have created a so-called Diamond open-access journal, now at level 1 in the Norwegian publication system - owned and controlled by you, the researchers of Norway.)
Enjoy your holidays!
Santa Klas
This articles was originally published on the 20th of December, 2022.