In January, SEBx attended the WASP  Winter Conference in Norrköping – one of the key annual events gathering researchers and industrial partners participating in the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program.

The agenda of these two days was filled with research talks, networking sessions, panel discussions, and presentations of the WASP Research Arenas – the WASP-funded special collaboration projects aiming to bridge the gap between academic research and industrial applications, and providing a unique opportunity to validate and refine scientific theories in real-world settings that are relevant to industries. One of the Arenas, focused on Media, Natural Language Processing, and Foundation Models,  is co-driven by SEBx together with Umeå University and Electronic Arts.

Some of the highlights of the conference include a technical keynote by Seyed-Ahmad Ahmadi - a Senior Solution Architect from NVIDIA, featuring company’s own open-source tools and frameworks for various applications, including Graph Learning, Large Language Models, and Medical Imaging. Over the past years, NVIDIA has been consistently providing support to fundamental AI research in Sweden through its collaboration with WASP. It is also worth mentioning the Panel discussion on AI as a tool for research and innovation between senior WASP-affiliated researchers – Aristides Gionis, Miriah Meyer, Ross D. King, Karin Stacke, and Lars Svensson. The participants outlined ways to ensure Sweden’s competitive advantage in leveraging AI for boosting further scientific discoveries.

Among other highlights, two research-based startups supported by the Wallenberg Launchpad program were presented by their founders – WASP researchers Luigi Nardi from Lund University, and Sonia Horchidan and Paris Carbone from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Luigi talked about DBTune - a company providing AI-powered database tuning service that originated from his research work, while Sonia and Paris gave an overview of OrbDB – the first Graph Database with natively integrated AI-based prediction capabilities that they are currently developing.

We are grateful to conference organizers, participants, and all members of the WASP community – by building and maintaining a strong network of collaborators from academia and industry we can ensure that Sweden remains excellent in advancing the state of the art in AI, and succeed in efficient and responsible adoption of new technologies across different industries.