The ever elusive time. It is amazing to look back and think Thimm and I have been here in Norway for 10 days. On one hand, it feels like 100, and on the other, that we arrived only yesterday.

This entry will cover essentially the rest of last week and the weekend; at first, it might not sound like a lot of time to create a dedicated blog post around, but I can assure you, it was a lot.

Last week, we left off just before the meeting with Sachin Gaur, a senior advisor at NORA, the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium. He was simply a wealth of insight, and it was quite enjoyable to hear about all the ways they are enabling researchers in Norway while also providing valuable services for the AI community at large. I highly recommend you read through our in-depth interview on the applydata blog [click the link below to go there!].

Eric McDermott

It’s not every day that you have three people doing different sorts of research and work within the field of AI, so we took this opportunity to continue our conversation after the planned time. Combined with a personalized tour through the streets of Oslo, Sachin ended up taking us to his favorite bar, colored with hand-painted murals and a DJ spinning vinyl just behind us.

Eric McDermott

Eventually, we parted with Sachin, but not before exchanging information. He also recommended a few companies to check out in various future stops along the way. One of which specializes in hyper-realistic “retina-quality” virtual reality headsets; something that particular interests me.

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Friday began with a few meetings, but then toward the afternoon, I had some time to rather work on making last week’s blog post and additional content. In an ideal week, diconium data would like to give their employees an 80%/20% split between working time and personal development time. In my current situation, this ratio is adding up to a bit more than 100%, but hey, you should always give 110%, right? ;)

… in any case, we thought, why not literally “work from the road” today. With Thimm at the wheel, I was able to create the entire introduction blog entry while we headed toward western Norway and the Fjords. We had a big adventurous weekend planned.

Eric McDermott