Whenever we meet for our yearly conferences, we expect a nice morning run with our CTO and co-founder, Johanna. The self-described “incurable optimist” loves trail running, even going as far to say as her dream travel destination would be “anywhere there is a trail.” It’s no surprise that she loves running so much, given her position as Associate Professor at the Department of Computing Science at Umeå University. Running on the trails probably allows for some time to clear her mind and further mull over her many research purviews, usually revolving around the semantic analysis of multimodal data.
“The aim is to achieve human-like understanding by incorporating diverse elements such as images, audio, video, and text.” This makes sense for someone who’s biggest pet peeve is anthropocentric belief systems: someone who truly believed in a human-centric hierarchy couldn’t be invested in finding ways to imbue technology with reason and intelligence. But she’s also a big believer of exploring and setting principles of ethics in AI, as evidenced by her service as the director of Wallenberg Research Arena for Media and Language, part of Wallenberg AI’s WASP (Autonomous Systems and Software Program.)
Johanna’s impressive CV belies her humble, personable approach to conversation. She admits to ‘answer her own questions to save time’ in conversations, although she usually asks the cleverest, most urgent questions to begin with. We’re lucky for her leadership and experience, her research and experiments answering questions ongoing for our product development.
Reach Johanna (she/her) (johanna.bjorklund@aeternalabs.ai) to talk best hike trails of Umeå and beyond, favourite Port wines, machine learning, or the history of western philosophy.