Klas H. Pettersen: Building AI partnerships in the Nordic countries
NORA's mission is to strengthen Norwegian research, innovation and education within AI and robotics. The last year this has increasingly been achieved through Nordic collaborations and partnerships, to the benefit of the AI community of all Nordic countries. In November 2021 NORA hosted a Nordic AI conference for young researchers (AImeet) and in 2021 we released a new, open AI journal with a Nordic focus: Nordic Machine Intelligence. The first issue of this scientific journal was based on a data competition with the topic of Transparency in Medical Image Segmentation, but we do not only publish scientific papers; opinions with a Nordic perspectives on AI are also welcome. The feedback from the other Nordic countries are unisone. They strongly support these initiatives and together we have suggested several ways to proceed in building partnerships across the Nordic AI networks. Based on last years' discussions with the other Nordic AI networks, discussions in organisation committees of AImeet, panel discussions including leaders of the Nordic AI networks etc. I will discuss how to continue this collaborative path, and how the Nordic AI networks and communities together could strengthen our position and build world leading competence.
Klas Pettersen is CEO of NORA – Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium, a collaboration within artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics between eight Norwegian universities, three university colleges and four research institutes within artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics. NORA’s mission is to strengthen Norwegian research, education and innovation within AI.
Originally educated as a civil engineer in physics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he studied quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, he turned into neuroscience and received a PhD in computational neuroscience in 2007 from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU).
From 2014 to 2019 Klas Pettersen worked as a research scientist at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo where he applied techniques from physics, mathematics, informatics and artificial intelligence to understand the brain and brain disease. From 2008 to 2013 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher and a research scientist at NMBU, in the Group for Computational Biology and later also at the Center for Integrative Genetics.
Dr. Pettersen has also worked as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California San Diego (2015), and as a consultant for Accenture. From 2019 he is the CEO of NORA.
