About us

The AI-lab at the National Library of Norway is an instrument to explore the potential use of AI in Libraries(, Archives and Museums). We also involve in research and development, and we build resources (datasets and models) for the community.

The People

Svein Arne Brygfjeld
Svein Arne has a long history at the National Library of Norway. He has been deeply involved on digital strategies, and he has previously been leading the deveopment of the NLN digital library for some years. His work experience also includes health care, telecom and startups.
Svein Arne is currently engaged in the AI community work within AI4LAM, and he is leading the AI-lab at the National Library of Norway with focus on applications of AI in libraries, archives and museums.

Freddy Wetjen

Freddy WetjenFreddy has worked in machine learning and artficial intelligence for the last 7 years. He has been responsible for the early desvelopement of AI in the NLN. Freddy also has considerable experience in developing real time applications in the telecom environment.

Freddys main focus is now to bridge the gap between experimental AI and useful applications in the library.

Javier de la Rosa

Javier de la RosaJavier de la Rosa is a Research Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the National Library of Norway, and a former Postdoctoral Fellow at UNED Digital Humanities Innovation Lab. He holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies with a specialization in Digital Humanities by the University of Western Ontario, and a Masters in Artificial Intelligence by the University of Seville. Javier has previously worked as a Research Engineer at the Stanford University Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research, and as the Technical Lead at the University of Western Ontario CulturePlex Lab for Cultural Complexity. He is interested in Natural Language Processing applied to historical and literary text, with a special focus on large language models.

Rolv-Arild Braaten

Rolv-Arild BraatenRolv-Arild recently graduated from NTNU in Trondheim with a master’s degree in computer science, with a focus on artificial intelligence, databases and search. He wrote his bachelor’s thesis on classification of text documents, and his master’s thesis on textual document retrieval using deep learning and language models. At the National Library, he is currently working on making useful tools for internal or public use.

Per Egil Kummervold

Per Egil KummervoldPer Egil Kummervold, PhD, is a Senior Researcher at the National Library of Norway. He worked at the lab from September 2020 to December 2021 where he was responsible for the Norwegian Transformer Model Project. The main deliveries from the project was publishing the first working Norwegian transformer model – nb-bert-base and the Norwegian Colossal Corpus. Starting from September 2022 he will be responsible for the Norwegian Speech Transformer Project that aims at using transformer-based models to improve Norwegian speech to text. As part of his EU-funded Marie Curie Researcher Exchange Program, he did together with the Digital Epidemiology Lab at EPFL, Switzerland, develop the COVID-Twitter-BERT-model. He also worked closely together with the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in using transformer models for getting a better understanding of vaccine sentiments. Kummervold is the developer of the North-T5-models, and currently holds a TPU Research Cloud Fellowship.