NR continues to strengthen the staff. After the summer holliday, two new research scientists have joined our research department SAMBA; Pierre Lison and Olav Nikolai Breivik.

Pierre Lison holds a M.Sc. in computer science and engineering from the University of Louvain (Belgium) and a M.Sc. in computational linguistics from the University of Saarland (Germany). After working for four years at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), he relocated to Oslo in 2011 to start a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Oslo. His thesis developed a new approach for dialogue management which combines expert domain knowledge and statistical models into a unified framework.

After defending his PhD in 2014, he was awarded a research grant from the Research Council of Norway for a postdoctoral project on statistical machine translation, also conducted at the University of Oslo. Pierre worked in various areas of machine learning and language technology, such as human-robot interaction, conversational interfaces, search technology, machine translation and text mining. At NR, Pierre will, among other topics, continue his postdoctoral project and work on personalized marketing as part of the Centre for Research-based Innovation Big Insight.

Olav Nikolai Breivik delivered in August 2016 his PhD-thesis in statistics at the Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo. The research in his PhD was mainly dedicated to Bayesian spatio-temporal modeling of bycatch in the Barents Sea shrimp fishery, and was conducted in collaboration with the Norwegian Marine Research Institute. The main purpose of this project was to predict future bycatch for performing cost effective regulations. Olav finished in June 2012 a Master in risk and reliability analysis at the Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo.

At NR, Olav will mainly be working on marine projects in cooperation with the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries and the Norwegian Marine Research Institute.