SPEAKERS - 2022
(in alphabetical order by last name)
Fiona Coath
Lead Consultant Developer, Thoughtworks
Speaking on Day 1, Session 3: Network Excellence and Internet Impact
![FionaCoath-Square[74].jpeg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/3b0e43_5be1add630094aa3b8e30c288b14532b~mv2.jpeg/v1/crop/x_1,y_0,w_478,h_480/fill/w_228,h_229,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/FionaCoath-Square%5B74%5D.jpeg)
Fiona Coath is a lead software developer and consultant with the leading global technology consultancy firm, Thoughtworks. During her more than 10 years in the software industry she has consulted 12 companies across almost as many industries, helping them solve problems across a range of technologies including natural language processing, customer segmentation and data analytics.
Originally from Australia where she completed degrees in computer science and in multimedia with a focus on video games and interactivity, she then went on to live and work in India and Singapore before moving to Germany where she is now based.
Her passion for social justice and equality keeps inspiring her to investigate the relationships between technology and society. In 2019 she toured Europe with her sought-after talk investigating the social impacts of bias in machine learning. Recently she is exploring the role that the technology industry plays in shaping our perceptions of the world and how this enables them to alter the political landscape.
Program Manager, AI Sweden
Johan is Head of Data Science at Cognite. He has a Master's degree in Industrial Mathematics at NTNU and a French Master in Management and Finance. His working career started with Information Management in Accenture. He then moved to IBM where he worked with the Watson technologies and cognitive computing. After a few years as a solution architect in Visma bWise, he moved to Cognite in 2018 to work as an architect before switching to data science.
Cognite was founded in 2016. The ambition is to operationalize the world's best industrial brain, with the ability to ingest and process industrial data using cognitive computing, enabling secure and scalable Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) services through its platform. Cognite Data Fusion aggregates and structures an ever-increasing source of data ranging from real-time sensor information, to maintenance logs, process diagrams and 3D models.
Cognite Data Fusion empowers internal and external experts to deploy advanced analytics models, algorithms and applications to visualize and solve real-world problems.
In the keynote presentation "Solving the industrial data problem", we will give an overview of which challenges we see in the industry, how we think about solving these and which role Cognite plays.
Johan Løwig Rambech Dahl
Head of Data Science, Cognite
Speaking on Day 2, session 6: Industry Excellence
Simen Eide
Head of Schibsted's AI Enablement Program
Speaking on Day 1, Session 2: Industrial Excellence
Simen Eide puts Schibsted’s AI strategies into practice. In his case it means helping people, teams and brands all around Schibsted to learn and use AI wherever it makes sense.
He learned his skills from working as a data scientist at Finn.no helping users navigate FINN's marketplace by building the recommender system algorithms. Using a variety of machine learning techniques, most recently using a bayesian recurrent neural net with hierarchical (content) priors.
At NorwAI Innovate he will focus on the cold start problem in recommender systems.
Simen was educated at NTNU and the University of Oslo and holds a master degree in mathematics.
Ståle Gjersvold
Program Manager, AI Sweden
CEO, TrønderEnergi/Aneo
Speaking on Day 2, Session 6: Industrial Excellence
Ståle Gjersvold was headhunted as the new CEO of TrønderEnergi in 2011 – and has since headed the transformation of the once municipality-owned energy company now turning into a major Nordic investor in green energies with HQ in Trondheim.
He has built his professional career at Equinor for twenty years, including leading large platform projects as project director for at-sea developments in Norway and the US/Mexican Gulf. On the way, he was educated Master of Technology at NTNU / NHH including a master’s degree at MIT Sloan School of Management and studies at Berkley University.
Odd Erik Gundersen
Chief AI Officer TrønderEnergi/Aneo,
Adjunct Associate Professor, NTNU
Speaking on Day 2, Session 6: Industrial Excellence
Odd Erik Gundersen is heading a team of 14 AI professionals at Trønder-Energi. The build-up of AI competence at Trønder-Energi has helped his company to a position as a leading developer of wind power in the Nordics and also to the significant investments in electrification initiatives in the last few years. At NorwAI Innovate, Odd Erik will talk on the challenges working on predictive maintenance to optimize production for wind turbines.
Odd Erik Gundersen took his PhD at in Computer Science – Artificial Intelligence at NTNU and is now teaching tech courses in AI as a member of the data and artificial intelligence group at the Departement of Computer Science.
Odd Erik Gundersen has held several positions in commercial businesses before joining TrønderEnergi. At the fast growing, global start-up MazeMap for indoor navigation, he was COO. At Verdande Technology, an oil- and gas technology company, he held multiple innovation and research positions, including positions like CTO.
Francisca Hoyer
Program Manager, AI Sweden
Francisca Hoyer is Strategic Program Manager at AI Sweden, the national center for applied artificial intelligence in Sweden. She co-leads the Natural Language Initiative, a new collaborative applied research environment that builds high-quality large language models for the Swedish language. Together with partners from academia, industry, and the public sector, she works to use the power of language models for the benefit of Swedish society. The focus is currently on GPT-SW3, the first truly large-scale generative language model for the Swedish language. Based on the same technical principles as the much-discussed GPT-3, GPT-SW3 will democratize access to this powerful new technology and help Swedish organizations build text processing applications never before possible.
Originally a trained historian, Francisca moved into the field of AI, after becoming interested in debates about ‘emotion’ recognition systems. She holds a Ph.D. from Uppsala University, Sweden, and has previously completed degrees in history and German literary studies at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include global and gender history, and south and southeast Asian history. They span questions such as power relations and representation in historical archives, as well as the history of emotions.
She now applies her experiences to the field of AI, where everything builds on historical data. She is passionate about pulling together innovation projects that engage stakeholders and partners who have not traditionally been involved in developing new technologies, and also diversifying the AI development pipeline with domain experts from the humanities and social sciences.
Program Manager, AI Sweden
Speaking on Day 1, Session 2: Research Excellence
Hiroto Nakajima
Chief Scientist, Nikkei
Speaking on Day 1, Session 3: Network Excellence and Internet Impact
Hiroto Nakajima is the Chief Scientist of Nikkei Inc., the largest economic media group in Japan with 2.6M subscribers. He leads many R&D projects of Nikkei Innovation Lab which serves the whole group including newspapers, magazines, TVs, financial data services and the market index Nikkei 225. Nikkei employs AI, machine learning or data science for various products and services. Nikkei AI News, one of his projects, is a full/semi-automatic video generation system operating since 2019. Another his project is Nikkei AR, which is a content augmentation for articles and advertisements on newspapers. He has been a spokesman of Lab’s activities at conferences in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Middle East.
He started his career as a theoretical physicist (Ph.D. in 2009) and explored the fundamental theory of nature. He passed CPA exam in 2011 and joined Pricewaterhouse Coopers, where he engaged in audit, risk evaluation and M&A due diligence for financial companies. He moved to a research institute of Nikkei, and then transferred to the current position and launched the Lab in 2017. He was awarded by Japan Press Net for his contribution to data journalism in 2019.
Now he is also a visiting researcher of two top-tier universities in Japan. His recent academic interest is the application of quantum computation in media industry. One of his academic outreaches is an image recognition display of cosmic rays in collaboration with National Museum of Science.
Program Manager, AI Sweden
Ana Peleteiro Ramallo is an experienced leader with 14 years in the field of artificial intelligence. She is currently a Director of Applied Science at Zalando, leading an organization that focuses on personalization and recommendations to help customers in their discovery journey and shopping experience, establishing Zalando as their starting point of fashion.
Prior to that, Ana was the Data Science Director at Tendam, a multi-brand international fashion retailer, where she was responsible for building the AI and cloud strategy and teams from the ground up, and led key initiatives for the company’s digital transformation. Before that, she was a Senior Data Scientist at Zalando, where she built data-driven products using Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Ana is also an external expert for the European Union on different topics such as evaluating research proposals and Marie Curie fellowships, amongst others.
Ana holds two engineering degrees, a PhD in AI with 35+ international peer reviewed publications and a master in executive leadership. She has been awarded on multiple occasions for her work and contributions to the community (e.g., Data Scientists of the Year, European Data Science & AI Awards). She is an active speaker in different venues and a firm advocate of knowledge sharing, as well as promoting and participating in women in tech initiatives.
Ana Peleteiro Ramallo
Director of Applied Science
Zalando
Speaking on Day 1, Session 2: Research Excellence
Paolo Rosso
Chief Scientist, Nikkei Inc
Paolo Rosso is Full Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de València, where he is also a member of the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) research center. His research interests are focused on social media data analysis, mainly on fake news and hate speech detection, author profiling, and sarcasm detection.
He has published 50+ articles in journals (34 Q1) and 400+ articles in conferences and workshops, he has an H-index of 67 (source: Google Scholar) and he is in the ranking of the top H-index scientists in Spain (http://www.guide2research.com/scientists/ES).
He has been PI of several national and international research projects funded by EC, U.S. Army Research Office, Qatar National Research Fund, and Vodafone Spain. Currently, he is the PI of the research project XAI-DisInfodemics on eXplainable AI for disinformation and conspiracy detection during infodemics (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation), a member of the EC IBERIFIER project on Monitoring the threats of disinformation (European Digital Media Observatory), and the project on Resources and Applications for Detecting and Classifying Polarized Hate Speech in Arabic Social Media (Qatar National Research Fund), and the recent FairTransNLP project on Fairness and Transparency for equitable NLP applications in social media (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation).
Professor
Technical University of Valencia
Speaking on Day 1, Session 2: Research Excellence
He has been advisor of 26 PhD theses and currently he is the advisor of 8 PhD students.
Paolo Rosso gave several keynotes (TSD-2020, CICLing-2019 etc.) and has helped organising 30+ shared tasks at the PAN Lab at CLEF and FIRE evaluation forums, SemEval, IberLEF and Evalita on topics such as author profiling (e.g. profiling bots, haters, and fake news spreaders), hate speech detection, irony detection, misogyny, sexism and toxic language identification.
He has been the chair of *SEM-2015, and organised conferences in Valencia such as: NLDB-2022, EACL-2017, CLEF-2013, and CERI-2012. He helped as senior chair or track chair in conferences such as SIGIR, ACL, COLING, EMNLP etc.
Since 2014 he is Deputy Steering Committee Chair of the CLEF Association. He is also Associate Editor at the Information Processing & Management journal. He gave several tutorials on plagiarism detection at ICON-2010, author profiling at RuSSIR-2014, RANLP-2015, FIRE-2016 and CLiC-it-2018, and harmful information (fake news and hate speech) at CIKM-2020. During the last 10 years the obtained results in plagiarism detection, irony detection, author profiling, credibility detection (fake news) were covered by Spanish (El País, ABC, La Vanguardia, El Mundo, El Levante, El Confidencial, Radio Nacional de España, La Cope) and international media (Reforma, Informador, CNN-Español).
Paolo Rosso did his PhD in Trinity College, Dublin.
Bjørn Taale Sandberg is a true veteran in Norwegian industrial research and happy to be back on his NTNU turf where he supported the founding of the Norwegian AI Open AI Lab.
At NorwAI Innovate Bjørn Taale Sandberg will speak on his impressions and experiences as a Chief Strategy Officer at the Finn telecom DNA, a subsidiary of the Telenor Group.
Sandberg has worked in the telecom sector for more than 25 years and has been with Telenor since 2000. For the last ten years at Telenor, he served as the Head of Telenor Research. Prior to this, heheld several senior director positions in the Group and other Telenor operating companies, including Chief Marketing Officer in Telenor Pakistan and Head of Strategy for Telenor Mobile Communications.
Sandberg holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Oslo and a Master of Management from Oslo Business School (BI).
Bjørn Taale Sandberg
CSO, DNA oy
Speaking on Day 2, Session 7: Nordic Excellence
Jarle Skrebergene
CEO, Aize
Speaking on Day 2, Session 6: Industrial Excellence
Jarle Skrebergene is CEO of Aize, founded in 2020 with a vision to fundamentally change how we execute capital projects and operations. Developed by and for domain experts, the Aize workspace allows users to visualise and navigate assets digitally, making collaboration more efficient. Aize aims to transform how heavy-asset industries behave and work.
Skrebergene joined Aize from Cognite, where he held the role of Vice President of Customer Success, EPC and OEM Lead. His professional career spans from Cognite, Arkwright, Kongsberg Digital and Deloitte. He holds an MSc in Industrial Economics from NTNU and in Corporate Finance and Financial Risk Management from The University California San Diego.
Aize is building on 30 years of software experience and 180 years of industrial heritage as part of the Norwegian Aker group, and is based in Norway, the UK, and the U.S.
Kjersti Løken Stavrum is CEO of Tinius Trust who is the controlling owner of the media group Schibsted. The trust’s main role is to ensure that Schibsted remains a media group based on a sustainable economy and characterized by free, independent quality journalism.
She has been a journalist and editor for most of her career – working with newspapers, magazines and online publications, always with innovation as a guiding principle.
For a short period, she was head of the communications department of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO) before she entered the position as secretary general of the Norwegian Press Association until she left for the Tinius Trust in 2016.
Løken Stavrum is president of Norwegian PEN, the Norwegian branch of the world’s largest organization for freedom of expression. She was head of the Norwegian government’s Commission on Freedom of Expression who presented it’s report in August 2022. She has been co-chair of the latets report from Forum on Information & Democracy (https://informationdemocracy.org) released this September.
She is educated as political scientist specializing in international relations, and has a master’s degree in management.
Kjersti Løken Stavrum
CEO, Tinius Trust
Speaking on Day 1, Session 3: Network Excellence and Internet Impact
Martin Svensson
Co-director, AI Sweden
Speaking on Day 2, Nordic Excellence
Martin Svensson is Co-director Operations AI Sweden. From his office in Gothenburg, Martin Svensson has build a network across Sweden with nine regional AI lighthouses serving 120 companies, institutions and organizations to speed up AI innovations in our neighboring country. He is eager to expand the international network, recently opened an office in Montreal, Canada and is looking for cooperation across borders, for instance with Norway.
Martin Svensson was educated at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden as a master of Science in electrical engineering. He has held a number of positions as strategist, CEO, board member and board chair at digital start-ups and speed-ups in multiple sectors like music, mobile, health and others.
He joined the Lindholmen Science Park in 2013 as a project manager and earned the top operational position for the national AI application program AI Sweden in 2019. At NorwAI Innovate Martin Svensson will tell the story of the expanding journey of AI Sweden.
Sven Størmer Thaulow is Chief Data & Technology Officer and EVP in Schibsted Media Group. Schibsted has 5,000 employees in 5 countries in the Nordic region. This includes a product & technology environment of approximately 1200 with cutting-edge expertise in the development of consumer services and the processing of large amounts of data.
Sven is an experienced leader in the telecommunications and IT industry. He began his career at Telenor in 1999 and has held a number of leading positions such as COO / SVP at Telenor Digital, CEO of Telenor Comoyo and director of new business areas at Telenor, Norway where he led services ranging from Wimp, games, communications and streaming online, for mobile and IPTV.
Sven has also worked as director of product and marketing at Telenor Hungary and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Telenor Mobil in Norway. He joined Schibsted from Cisco Norway & Iceland where he served as CEO.
Sven has a master's degree in Industrial Economics and Technology Management from NTNU, and also has studies in statistics as well as media and communication.
Sven is passionate about exponential technology, change and digitalisation of business and society.
Sven is chairman of the board of NorwAI.
Sven Størmer Thaulow
Chief Data and Technology Officer/EVP Schibsted
Speaking on Day 2, Nordic Excellence
Hilde Tonne
President and CEO
Statnett
Speaking on Day 1, Opening Session
Hilde Tonne is the President & CEO of Statnett SF. Statnett is the Norwegian Transmission System Operator for electricity, and together with the other Nordic TSOs the company is responsible for maintaining the balance between consumption and production at all times in the entire Nordics region.
Hilde Tonne came to Statnett from Ramboll Group, where she served as Executive Director and Chief Innovation Officer. Tonne had different positions at the Group Executive Management of Telenor Group 2007-2015. She has until recently served as Chair of the the Research Council of Norway, and has previously alså served as Director of the Board of several large industry companies including amongst others Vattenfall AB, Danske Bank Group, DNV GL, Hafslund AS and Statkraft AS.
The power system is going through a fundamental change to facilitate the carbon neutral society. Increased complexity and intermittent production require data-driven automated processes to be able to balance the interconnected European power system. This digital transition is a high priority in Statnetts strategy.
Hilde Tonne is dedicated to lead Statnett in forefront of the green shift. Digitalization will be a key component towards enabling a fully electric society.
Tonne is one of the founders of Digital Norway, where Statnett is a member.