Changkyu Choi introducing his Thesis.
Changkyu Choi defended his PhD thesis “Advancing Deep Learning for Marine Environment Monitoring” on June 9th 2023 at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
The key objectives of Changkyu Choi thesis is advancing both deep learning and marine environment monitoring, this by addressing the challenges linked to limited annotated data. Choi has develop a new explainable deep learning method that generates explanations tailored to the needs and preferences of the users and evaluated these in the context of marine environment monitoring.
Evaluation Committee
Supervisors
Marine environment monitoring has become increasingly significant due to the excessive exploitation of oceans, which detrimentally impacts ecosystems. Deep learning provides an effective monitoring approach by automating the analysis of vast amounts of observed image data, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions regarding fishing quotas or conservation efforts. The success of deep learning is often attributed to its capacity to extract relevant features from data, without the need for handcrafted rules or heuristics. However, this capability is not without limitations, as the intricate feature extraction process of deep learning-based systems poses fundamental challenges. A lack of annotated data presents an inherent challenge for deep learning. The widespread success of deep learning has primarily relied on the ample availability of annotated data, while deep learning models encounter difficulties when learning from limited annotations. However, obtaining annotated data is expensive, particularly in the context of marine environment monitoring, as it is often a manual process demanding the expertise of domain specialists. Another challenge of deep learning is a lack of explainability. The black-box nature of deep learning models can make it difficult to understand how they arrive at their decisions. This hinders their adoption in critical decision-making processes, as stakeholders may be hesitant to trust models whose decision-making rationale is not transparent or interpretable. To address the challenges and further advance deep learning methodologies, this thesis proposes three novel deep learning methods, highlighting marine environment monitoring as an application domain.
Link to thesis in Munin
Acknowledgement
The PhD project was a collaboration between Institute of Marine Research, The Norwegian computing center and UiT The Arctic University of Norway. The project was funded by COGMAR and Visual Intelligence.
Registration for the Northern Lights Deep Learning Conference 2026 is officially open. Early bird fees are available before December 1st 2025.
Det skal eksperter på kunstig intelligens, cybersikkerhet og juss fra UiT Norges arktiske universitet diskutere på Verdensteatret Kino den 17. september. Arrangementet er gratis og åpen for alle (Norwegian news article at uit.no)
The presentations from the Visual Intelligence Workshop on Foundation Models are now available on the Visual Intelligence YouTube channel.
Congratulations to Nikita Shvetsov for successfully defending his PhD thesis and achieving the PhD degree in Science at UiT The Arctic University of Norway on August 27th 2025.
Det sa digitaliseringsminister Karianne Tung (Ap) da hun besøkte UiT Norges arktiske universitet i Tromsø for å lære mer om utdanning og toppforskning på kunstig intelligens ved universitetet (Norwegian news article at uit.no)
A new study shows how deep learning can achieve human-level performance in estimating uncertainty when classifying foraminifera (News story at EurekAlert.org)
Congratulations to Iver Martinsen and Durgesh Kumar Singh, who successfully defended their PhD theses at UiT The Arctic University of Norway on August 20th and 21st respectively.
Visual Intelligence brought together academia, industry, the institute sector, the Research Council of Norway, and Norwegian politics to discuss why and how Norwegian academia and industry should collaborate more closely to develop innovative artificial intelligence.
João Campagnolo is a PhD Candidate in the Neuroscience Department of the University of Copenhagen (KU). He visited SFI Visual Intelligence in Tromsø from April to May 2025.
Students from EUGLOH partner institutions can now apply for an exclusive mobility scholarship worth 2 900 EUR for the NLDL 2026 Winter School. Application deadline October 3rd 2025
Visual Intelligence will be well represented at MICCAI 2025—one of the leading AI conferences on medical imaging and computer assisted intervention—with three recently accepted research papers.
More than 50 attendees from the Norwegian AI research community gathered in Tromsø, Norway for two days of insightful presentations, interactive technical sessions, and scientific and social interactions.
Last week, we wished Aasland—accompanied by Political Advisor Munir Jaber and Senior Adviser Finn-Hugo Markussen—welcome to the Norwegian Computing Center (NR). One of the visit's goals was to showcase ongoing Visual Intelligence projects at NR.
Alba Ordoñez and Anders U. Waldeland presented ongoing work on seismic foundation models and an interactive seismic interpretation engine at EAGE Annual 2025 in Toulouse, France.
Østmo was invited to Abels tårn—one of the largest popular science radio shows in Norway—to answer listener-submitted questions related to artificial Intelligence (AI). The live show took place at Blårock Cafe in Tromsø, Norway on June 12th.
VI industry partner Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) received an Industrial PhD grant from the Research Council of Norway. The project will be closely connected to Visual Intelligence's "Earth observation" innovation area.
Visual Intelligence Researchers Amund Vedal and Arnt Børre Salberg recently presented ongoing Visual Intelligence research at a plankton-themed workshop organized by the Institute of Marine Research (IMR), Norway
We happily welcome Dennis Adamek, who recently started as a Doctoral Research Fellow at Visual Intelligence in Tromsø in April 2025.
Congratulations to Professor Lars Ailo for receiving the NORA Award for Diversity in AI at the NORA Annual Conference in Halden, Norway.
Teresa Dorszewski is a PhD Candidate at the Section for Cognitive Systems at the Technical University of Denmark. She visited Visual Intelligence in Tromsø from January to April 2025.