Winners of the SAIS AI Master’s Thesis Award 2024

This year we received 5 nominations, which were all reviewed by several SAIS board members. Although we received many high-quality nominations, after the review process the highest ranked thesis by the reviewers, at the same time the one considered most interesting for a presentation at the SAIS workshop, was selected by the board as this years winner.

The SAIS Best AI Master’s Thesis Award 2024 goes to:
Ludvig Widén and Emil Wiman for the thesis entitled Autonomous 3D exploration with dynamic obstacles– Towards Intelligent Navigation and Collision Avoidance for Autonomous 3D Exploration with dynamic obstacles, conducted at Linköping University under the supervision of Mattias Tiger.

Motivation:
The thesis addresses an important challenge within AI, focusing on autonomous navigation amidst dynamic obstacles, which is a necessary prerequisite to making robots that safely interact with humans. The thesis provides an extensive coverage of background and related work, while additionally making a substantial scientific contribution. The work provides a solution in the form of a dynamic autonomous exploration planner, which performs 3D explorations while including dynamic obstacles in the planning process. The work has already been accepted as a full paper in a prestigious robotics conference (ICRA 2024).

The thesis will be presented at the SCAI symposium 2024 (see: https://ju.se/samarbeta/event-och-konferenser/konferens/scai-symposium-2024.html), at Jönköping University on June 10-11 2024.

Congratulations to the winners, and a big thanks to everyone who nominated a thesis as well as the reviewers for their assessment effort!

The SAIS board,
through Eva Blomqvist, SAIS secretary

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The SAIS AI Master’s Thesis Award 2024 – Call for nominations

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 10 000 SEK, and is expected to present the winning contribution in connection with the SCAI symposium 2024 in June.

Deadline for nomination is February 25th 2024.

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, 2023 – January 31, 2024.
  • 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 SCAI symposium is planned for June 10-11 2024, at JTH in Jönköping.

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

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SCAI Symposium 2024 – June 10-11 , Jönköping, Sweden

The 14th Scandinavian conference on AI (SCAI) ,2024 aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from the field of Artificial Intelligence to present and discuss ongoing work and future directions for AI. It provides a forum for networking among researchers as well as building links with related research fields, practitioners and businesses.

The SCAI Symposium conference 2024 will be hosted at School of Engineering (JTH) in Jönköping. Please check the event webpage for submission instructions, program and registration details.

Welcome to Jönköping in June!

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Winner of the SAIS AI Master’s Thesis Award 2023

This year we received 6 nominations, which were all reviewed by several SAIS board members. Although we received many high-quality nominations, after the review process the highest ranked thesis by the reviewers, at the same time the one considered most interesting for a presentation at the SAIS workshop, was selected by the board as this years winner.

The SAIS Best AI Master’s Thesis Award 2023 goes to:
Leila Methnani for the thesis entitled “Embracing AWKWARD! A Hybrid Architecture for Adjustable Socially-Aware Agents“, conducted at Umeå University under the supervision of Andreas Theodorou.

Motivation:
The thesis is very well written and the topic is highly timely, since it combines both reasoning and machine learning into a hybrid AI system. The thesis presents promising results and contribute towards important long-term goals, such as transparency of AI. The work has already been published in scientific venues, which is another clear indication of its substantial contribution.

The thesis will be presented at the SAIS workshop 2023 (see: https://www.bth.se/forskning/forskningsomraden/datavetenskap/sais-23/), at BTH on June 12-13 2023.

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

The SAIS board,
through Eva Blomqvist, SAIS secretary

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The SAIS AI Master’s Thesis Award 2023 – Call for nominations

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 10 000 SEK, and is expected to present the winning contribution in connection with the SAIS workshop 2023 in June.

Deadline for nomination is February 24th 2023.

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, 2022 – January 31, 2023.
  • 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 SAIS workshop is planned for June 12-13 2023, at BTH in Karlskrona.

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

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Winner of the SAIS Best AI Master’s Thesis 2022

This year we received 6 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 2022 goes to Gustavo Teodoro Döhler Beck for the thesis entitled “Wavebender GAN: Deep architecture for high-quality and controllable speech synthesis through interpretable features and exchangeable neural synthesizers“, conducted at KTH.

Motivation:
The thesis is in the area of speech generation and presents a novel architecture for controllable speech generation, and evaluates it showing impressive results. The thesis is well written, with a thorough discussion of related work, interesting discussion of results, and in addition covers aspects such as ethical considerations. A paper based on the thesis has been accepted at the 2022 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, further establishing the substantial research contribution made by the thesis.

We hope that the thesis will be presented at the SAIS workshop 2022 (see: https://www.ri.se/sv/sais-2022), in Stockholm in June.

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

The SAIS board,
through Eva Blomqvist, SAIS secretary

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The SAIS AI Master’s Thesis Award 2022 – Call for nominations

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 2022 in June (to be held in Stockholm, details to be determined).

Deadline for nomination is February 6th 2022.

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, 2021 – January 31, 2022.
  • 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 SAIS workshop is planned for June 13-14 2021, in Stockholm – details still to be determined.

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

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SAIS 2022 Workshop, Stockholm, June 13-14

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 researchers and practitioners in AI and related disciplines, in Sweden and the rest of the world, to join us in exchanging knowledge, news and results on AI related theory and applications.

SAIS 2022 will take place in Stockholm, Sweden, on June 13-14, 2022. The event is planned to be hybrid, combining in-person and virtual participation. This year, the SAIS workshop is hosted by RISE – Research Institutes of Sweden.

More information can be found here:
ri.se/en/sais-2022
There you can also sign up on the events mailing list for further updates.

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SAIS 2021 Workshop successfully concluded

The 2021 edition of the SAIS has been a great success, despite the fact that we had to do it virtually for the second time. We had more than 80 registered participants and several visitors following selected keynote presentations and the panel discussion.

This edition of the workshop is hosted by the Machine Learning group at the Luleå University of Technology and was planned as a hybrid event with both physical and online participation. Unfortunately, due to the recent increased concern for the situation regarding the Coronavirus (COVID-19) also this year’s conference was held online.

screenshot taken during the closing discussion (only video participants shown)

Out of the 31 submissions, SAIS 2021 accepted 12 papers for inclusion in the IEEE proceedings and 16 non-archived contributions, including 6 Ph.D. project descriptions presented in mentoring sessions. We are happy to see a good number of contributions from collaborations including most Swedish universities active in the field and also some research organizations, and companies. Most contributions are non-archived presentations of work in progress, which are further improved using the review comments and experience from discussions at the workshop and possibly lead to archived publications in other venues. This spirit, i.e., giving feedback to peer researchers and mentoring PhD students from other groups, is one of the major missions of the SAIS workshop – with the goal to increase the scientific quality of AI research in Sweden.

The program of SAIS 2021 includes a variety of topics, ranging from AI applications in fields such as computer vision, epidemic modeling, fluid dynamics, healthcare, human-machine interaction, mining, and retail, to investigations of methods for problems such as gesture recognition, multi-modal domain translation, neuromorphic sensing, privacy-preserving learning using homomorphic encryption, self-supervision, and visual instance segmentation. We would like to express our gratitude to all the authors who submitted their work, to the program committee and reviewers, and to the organizers, student mentors, and session chairs. 

Finally, we thank the highly reputed plenary speakers – Seiichi Uchida, Elena Fersman, and Elisabetta Chicca, and the contributors to the special session focusing on Swedish-Brazilian research collaboration.

More information and videos of selected highlights can be found here:

https://www.aidih.se/sv-SE/event-45068283

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SAIS Master’s Thesis Award 2021 – Winner announced

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

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