Swedish AI Society | SAIS

This year we received 4 nominations, which were all reviewed by several SAIS board members. After the review process, one thesis stood out, receiving the highest ranking by the reviewers:

The SAIS Best AI Master’s Thesis Award 2021 goes to Fredrik Svanström, Högskolan i Halmstad, for the thesis entitled “Drone Detection and Classification using Machine Learning and Sensor Fusion”.

The thesis is in the areas of machine learning and presents a system for multi-sensor-based drone detection and classification as well as a drone detection dataset. The thesis is well written, comprehensive and technically sound, with interesting results, not least in terms of the practical feasibility of multi-sensor-based drone detection. The thesis also offers an interesting outlook and constitutes a good starting point for future work.

The thesis will be presented at the SAIS workshop 2021 (Luleå/online), in June.

Congratulations to the winner, and a big thanks to everyone who nominated a thesis!

The SAIS board,
through Eva Blomqvist, SAIS secretary

Hej,

Welcome to the 33rd SAIS Workshop: SAIS 2021. This edition of the annual workshop of the Swedish Artificial Intelligence Society (SAIS) will be held as a hybrid conference on June 14 – 16, 2021. This means there will be room for both physical and online participation. Please, mark 14 & 15 as the main conference dates but also reserve the 16 for a possible additional event.

More information online: https://www.ltu.se/research/subjects/Maskininlarning/SAIS-2021?l=en

*** DEADLINE EXTENDED to March 12th ***

In order to stimulate work in the area of artificial intelligence at the undergraduate level of education, SAIS has created a special yearly award for the best Master’s thesis (examensarbete) in the area of artificial intelligence. The winner will be awarded travel funds of 5000SEK, and is expected to present the winning contribution in connection with the SAIS workshop 2021 in June (details to be determined).

Deadline for nomination is February 28 2021. March 12th 2021.

To nominate a Master’s Thesis for the award, the following rules apply:

• The thesis is in one of the main areas of artificial intelligence research.
• The thesis has been presented officially during the period of January 1, 2020 – January 31, 2021.
• An electronic copy of the thesis (PDF) and a short written motivation by the nominator should be submitted through the following EasyChair submission area. The nomination should include a short motivation why the thesis should be selected as the winner, and state its contributions to AI. Please note that the “author” of the nomination is the person nominating the thesis, i.e. NOT the authors of the thesis, and in the “abstract” field please enter the motivation letter.
• The nominating person must be a member of SAIS, but does not have to be the official examiner or primary supervisor.
• Only one thesis nomination per nominating person is permitted.
• The master thesis project has to be conducted by a student registered at a Swedish university or other higher education establishment in Sweden, and/or present work mainly conducted at an organisation within Sweden, and/or represent a thesis where the official presentation was done in Sweden.

The SAIS board will review the nominated Master’s theses and determine a winner based on factors such as novelty, thoroughness, readability, scientific value and relevance to artificial intelligence, both with respect to research and to potential applications. The decision by the SAIS board will be final. The exact dates of the SAIS workshop where the winner will present the thesis is still to be confirmed, but is planned for June 2021, in Luleå/online.

Fredrik Heintz – President of SAIS
Eva Blomqvist – Secretary of SAIS

The 32nd annual workshop of the Swedish Artificial Intelligence Society (SAIS) will be held as an online conference on June 16 – 17, 2020.

The SAIS workshop has since its first edition been a forum for building the Swedish AI research community and nurture networks across academia and industry. We invite AI researchers and practitioners in Sweden and the rest of the world, as well as related research disciplines and industry, to join us for an online conference.

Due to the increased concern for the situation regarding the Coronavirus (COVID-19) this year’s conference will be held online and free to attend using the remote conferencing service Zoom. The talks will be held live with opportunities for interaction and questions to the speakers.

See the workshop webpage for more information and the program.

This year the SAIS conference is hosted by AI Innovation of Sweden, Chalmers, and the University of Gothenburg.

This year we received 8 nominations, which were all reviewed by several SAIS board members. In the end, the board was not able to distinguish between the two top theses, hence the award this year is shared by two winners. The official announcement is as follows:

The SAIS Best AI Master’s Thesis Award 2020 goes to Elias Lousseief, KTH, for the thesis entitled “MahlerNet: Unbounded Orchestral Music with Neural Networks”, and Ulme Wennberg, KTH, for the thesis entitled “An evaluation of BERT for a Span-based Approach for Jointly Predicting Entities, Coreference Clusters and Relations Between Entities”. Both the theses are extensive and well written, and treat problems at the core of AI research. Congratulations to the winners!

The thesis by Elias Lousseief treats the interesting open problem of music composition by machines, based on machine learning models. One of the strengths of the thesis is the extensive literature survey. Together with the clear and useful introduction to basic concepts this makes the thesis a valuable resource for anyone starting up work in the area. In addition, the thesis provides a novel solution for music generation, as well as valuable discussions on both technical and ethical aspects of the work, which has been published in a paper at the 2019 Nordic Sound and Music Computing conference. We look forward to an interesting presentation, perhaps including a musical performance, at SAIS workshop!

The thesis by Ulme Wennberg is in the area of Natural Language Processing, a core subfield of AI, and evaluates the use of recent language models for important NLP tasks. The evaluation is comprehensive and technically sound, with interesting results, and has been published as part of a paper at EMNLP2019. The work is a solid research contribution in the NLP area, as well as relevant for AI in general. The presentation of the thesis at SAIS workshop will attract a broad interest and open up for many interesting discussions!

Both the theses will be presented at the SAIS workshop 2020 (online), on June 16th.

Congratulations to the winners, and a big thanks to everyone who nominated a thesis!

The SAIS board,
through Eva Blomqvist, SAIS secretary

At this year’s SAIS workshop, in Umeå, we had the pleasure to listen to two presentations from both the SAIS AI Master’s Thesis award winners from 2018 and 2019.

First out was Sólrún Halla Einarsdóttir, the winner of best AI Master’s Thesis 2018, who presented her thesis “Theory Exploration on Infinite Structures“. In her presentation she presented her work on extending the theory exploration system Hipster, using the extension with the Isabelle theorem prover. In her presentation she demoed the implementation and discussed the evaluation that shows the usefulness of the new theories generated. Congratulations, Sólrún, for great work and a great presentation!

Next, was the presentation from our 2019 winners, Jesper Jönsson and Emmy Sjöstrand, with the winning thesis entitled “Cell Image Transformation Using Deep Learning“. In their presentation they introduced the problem of image transformation that they have addressed at the company Cella Vision AB. In their thesis they evaluated a number of different techniques to transform images, originating from different types of microscope cameras, into images looking exactly as a medical analyst would expect them to look, e.g., with respect to colors and level of detail, as if it was coming from a traditional microscope. Congratulations to Jesper and Emmy for their interesting and useful results, as well as for a great presentation at the workshop!

We now look forward to next year’s award – if you have some really good Master’s students presenting their work during 2019, don’t forget to nominate them for the award in 2020!

** Deadline extended, new deadline March 1st 2019 **

In order to stimulate work in the area of artificial intelligence at the undergraduate level of education, SAIS has created a special yearly award for the best Master’s thesis (examensarbete) in the area of artificial intelligence. The winner will be awarded travel funds of 5000SEK, and is expected to present the winning contribution in connection with the SAIS workshop 2019.

To nominate a Master’s Thesis for the award, the following rules apply:

• The thesis is in one of the main areas of artificial intelligence research.
• The thesis has been presented officially during the period of January 1, 2018 – January 31, 2019.
• An electronic copy of the thesis (PDF) and a short written motivation by the nominator should be sent to mthprize@sais.se, include the terms “SAIS” and “Master’s Thesis award” in the subject line, no later than February 22nd March 1st, 2019. The nomination should include a short motivation why the thesis should be selected as the winner, and state its contributions to AI.
• The nominating person must be a member of SAIS, but does not have to be the official examiner or primary supervisor.
• Only one thesis nomination per nominating person is permitted.
• The master thesis project has to be conducted by a student registered at a Swedish university or other higher education establishment in Sweden, and/or presented in Sweden.

The SAIS board will review the nominated Master’s theses and determine a winner based on factors such as novelty, thoroughness, readability, scientific value and relevance to artificial intelligence, both with respect to research and to potential applications. The decision by the SAIS board will be final. The date and location of the SAIS workshop where the winner will present the thesis is still to be determined.

Fredrik Heintz – President of SAIS
Eva Blomqvist – Board member of SAIS