#1: AIM'ing for a Human-First Future

“Hey, can you hear me? Is my microphone on? Sorry, I should be good at this by now!” AIM North Symposium 2022 has come to an end I’m now sitting back reflecting on the day. After an involuntary pandemic pause of two years, we decided to organize AIM North as a physical-only event. We wanted people to meet up again, in person and not in front of the flat screen. One of my colleagues actually stated this enlightening sentence: "It will be nice to see if people actually have legs". Some said "Bold move", "The future is hybrid so don’t do it," others said. Being used to streaming broadcasting and hybrid options, we didn’t really know if this was a good idea, to go all physical with no streaming option whatsoever. We know that physical-only used to work before the pandemic and we know digital-only worked throughout the pandemic because we had no other choice, but to hybrid where we actually have a choice? Talking to one of the VCs we're working with, he said: Hybrid is the "worst of two worlds". So, we had as many opinions as there are options, so we decided to test our hypothesis. Were the participators going to turn up after two years of hibernation or do we all choose to stay at home waiting for the link to be distributed as we are used to?

At 07:45, we opened the doors for a thirty-minute breakfast and networking session prior to going on stage with the keynote speakers. Only about one hundred people turned up! I was nervous. In the large auditorium, seating five hundred we started the event with 4 of 5 chairs being empty. At that point, I seriously doubted our judgement that people will actually come. One hour later, they did! The auditorium was filled up before 10:00, people just choose to turn up a bit later but with an overdose of energy and the urge to network. After the lunch break, even more, people joined in for the breakout sessions. I could relax now! We could finally meet, network and interact - like humans!

The morning plenary session was packed with serious food for thought from tech optimists like Eirik Norman Hansen, Trond Riiber Knudsen, Stefan Engeseth and Morten Goodwin along with a long list of speakers delivering inspirational keynotes.?All in all, more than 70 speakers participated at AIM North this year.

What they all had in common was a clear message that with great power comes great responsibility! The superpower that Artificial Intelligence represents is a double-edged sword and we need to demonstrate great care when applying it to our organizations and daily life.

Check out the complete list of speakers at our website aim2north.com

How ethical is artificial intelligence?

This year, there was a particular focus on “Ethical AI” in every single speech touching on the fact that AI systems are not morally accountable agents. This has created an ethical breach in the sphere of the applied science of AI that the growing number of frameworks for AI ethics are currently trying to fill. In conclusion, the implementation of ethics is crucial for AI systems for multiple reasons: to provide safety guidelines that can prevent existential risks for humanity, to solve any issues related to bias, to build friendly AI systems that will adopt our ethical standards, and to help humanity flourish.

From AI Winter to AI Spring

Rector Kristen Krogh at Oslo Metropolitan University opened AIM North 2022 referring to his time as a researcher within Machine learning when Norway & The Nordics had an “AI Winter” and was quite far behind in the AI race. We are now facing an “AI spring” with a more united Europe racing to catch up with the Battle of Giants, namely the USA & China, by pushing sustainability, collaboration and personal privacy.

Morten Irgens, representing CLAIRE The Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe, continued with his reflections on the subject under his title “Europe’s Dream of Tech Sovereignty”. Throughout history, technology has not only transformed economies and societies: it has been a major redistributor of power among states and a major force shaping and reshaping international relations.?Today’s accelerated technology development is creating an accelerated far-reaching redistribution of international power. And AI is the canary in the mine.

Conceptualizing cross-sector collaboration with the Pentahelix Framework

The venue of AIM North 2022 was the academic institution Oslo Metropolitan University with researchers from more than fifteen universities across Norway, Sweden and the Nordics participating including the University of Oslo, NTNU, KTH in Stockholm and Roskilde University in Denmark. Combining academic research with Applied AI in public sectors and large corporations with startups and capital is the very essence of MIT Reap’s Pentahelix model & framework.

Eli Haugerud at SMART Innovation Norway’s cluster for Applied AI stressed its importance, particularly in how innovation catalyzes at the intersection between the stakeholders. As the plenary sessions moved towards the end, we noticed more and more focus on not only Applied AI but on Corporate Innovation and AI Startups, a seemingly strong trend in the AI ecosystem. This topic is so hot that I will need to give it a further look at the end of this article.

Interactions & Breakouts

During the lunch break, our partners had the opportunity to exhibit and network. Here's a quote: "There was no way Avanade could miss a symposium in Oslo with a topic as important as Ethical AI. At Avanade we believe everyone counts, we are committed to inclusion and diversity and want to use tech for social good. We do work on Digital Ethics around the globe in academia and contribute to work on standards together with the?IEEE." Henrik Brattlie, Delivery Management & Group Manager and Talent Community Lead at Avanade

Check out Avanade's article on AIM North here: Avanade Article AIM North 2022

After the lunch break with exhibitions, networking and podcasting, AIM North 2022 had four focused breakout sessions in a workshop style designed for talks, interactions with the audience and problem-solving focused around the conference or event theme AI Ethics.

Nils Jacob Berland from Bergen Robotics moderated 15 speakers at the highly technical DeepTech track featuring Lilian Smedstad at Inmeta who discussed Intelligence at the edge.

During her PhD, she was part of the team discovering the Higgs boson, a discovery subsequently rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics. Other profiled speakers included Tom Gilb, known for his early work on evolutionary software development processes, which was a forerunner of agile software development methods. Eli Haugerud steered the Applied AI track zeroing in on practical applications of Artificial Intelligence with just as many speakers covering everything from Smart Cities, AI implementation in Government Administration and Flying drones to Agriculture.

Marie Granander at the Swedish Initiative DigitalWell Arena moderated the HealthTech track with stars like Arnoldo Frigessi, Professor at Oslo University Hospital designing frameworks for the entire Healthcare system in Norway. Last and perhaps the track with most participants and definitely the one with the highest noise levels was AIM-X, the innovation track for startups and investors. AIM-X was a show in two acts. In act one, AI Startups got to pitch to a panel of tech investors – The Sharks – followed by tough Q&A sessions on the stage.

In act two, the Swedish-Norwegian HealthTech accelerator DigitalWell Ventures held their DEMO Day with nine startups from across the Nordics and Baltics.

Where Does Innovation Happen? It’s Not Where You Think

It has always been difficult to measure what “good” looks like in corporate innovation. For one thing, companies are always changing what they do. Large Corporates have tried many different ways to innovate their businesses — setting up accelerator programmes for startups, encouraging staff to become intrapreneurs, investing in startups through corporate venturing arms. It is not always clear which of these works best. However, one thing seems to be clear. They are all glancing at the startup ecosystem trying to find their own "secret sauce" as to how to apply disruptive, Horizon 3 level innovation to a corporate context. Needless to say, That's not easy!

It's interesting to see how large corporations interact with startups and scaleups learning from those that do it best. A few of the ?? Hot trends right now are:

Venture building; Many corporates are now moving to build their own startups. Some 80% of leading companies have a venture builder programme, but only 30% have had one in place for more than three years. The companies tend to allocate funds for their venture building programmes and aim to build 3-5 projects each year.

Venture client model; Many leading corporates have some kind of structured programme to scout startups that they might want to work with. The scale of these scouting operations is huge. Some large companies will typically look at 1,000-5,000 startups each year, whittling them down to a shortlist of around 200. Of those, around 10-20% will go on to do a pilot project with a company and typically around 20 might go on a full commercial deal. It’s a pretty brutal funnel, but leading companies go on to buy around $50m-100m worth of goods or services from these startups each year, so the deals can be very lucrative for the startups that make it through.

The rapid pace, huge need and pain points addressed by large corporates in disruptive innovation and the need for a new framework that actually works between startups and corporates make me think that AIM-X may need to be upgraded to include corporates in a larger context. Perhaps AIM-X will be a Community in itself next year. What do you think?

Post-Event Reception

The day ended with a packed post-event reception in our office at Pier X Venture Hub at Aker Brygge going on into the late hours. As always, this is where the real business happened... In conclusion, we love to meet up physically and it still works! The question is more: Do we like to sacrifice physical attendance by enabling hybrid options? I leave this question open-ended but I know what I prefer...

A big thanks to all the partners in Xplorico, Oslo Metropolitan University and NORA – Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium. You know who you are!

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