10.1 Introduction
Part of NORA’s mission is to become a na­tional access point for AI competence and infrastructure. To fulfil this mission NORA has made it a priority to provide a compre­hensive overview of ongoing research, education and innovation in the field of AI in Norway. NORA’s list of academic AI entities has been made available online both through AI maps and the Norwegian AI Directory.

The AI maps help provide a geographic overview of academic AI enti­ties on national and a European level. The creation of the Norwegian AI Directory is focused on national access listing AI labs (including groups and centres), AI projects, educational courses, AI startups, AI conferences and funding opportunities.

The AI maps project was initiated to turn the tacit knowledge of the AI ecosystem at the NORA secretariat and our research consortium into an accessible display to help all stakeholders get an overview of the field of AI in Norway and in Europe.

The Norwegian AI map is featured on NORA’s website to provide an overview of both the members of the consortium as well as their research groups, institutes and labs related to the field of AI. As the Nor­wegian landscape of academic AI entities develops, the map will change accordingly.

The European AI map is displayed on the Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe (CLAIRE) website, where all actors identi­fied by NORA on a national level have been included to be shared in this international network. CLAIRE currently has a mem­bership of over 435 labs and institutions. NORA helped to build this European map.

The first map contributes to mapping the Norwegian landscape, and the second map contributes to putting Norwegian AI research communities on the European map.

During summer 2021, NORA together with summer interns began an effort to map AI projects, educational courses, and startups in Norway. Later this expanded to cover funding, conferences, and infor­mation about AI labs. As of 31 December 2021, the website contains information about: 18 AI Labs, 786 AI Projects and 156 University Courses.

As such it is a public resource in English to anyone attempting to navigate the field of AI in Norway and thus partly fulfils the goal of becoming a national access point. This resource has been shared repeatedly in the CLAIRE network and presented at NORA’s annual conference 2021.

Further interest has been expressed by researchers to contribute to building his resource. The wish for the future of the project is to create better visualisations and gather data at a researcher level. Another idea has been to create an overview of AI deployment in Norway to help those interested to explore specific case studies of applied AI.

In January 2021, NORA, Smart Innovation Norway, and the Norwegian Open AI Lab (NAIL) joined forces to map the Norwegian AI Startup Landscape. The collaboration was formed as a precursor to an invitation to join the European AI Startup Landscape, which features more than 500 AI startups from France, Germany, and Sweden.

As the AI startup community in Norway continues to grow both in number but also in maturity, NORA recognised the need to map the startup landscape in Norway. By showcasing and promoting the startups on the European AI Startup Landscape, we aim to introduce the great innovators in Norway to each other, as well as colleagues in Europe, early in­vestors, and potential customers.

The Norwegian AI Startup Landscape will build on the mapping efforts of the AI Directory and will evaluate and quality check existing AI startups and give them a visible platform to showcase their technology and innovations. By creating such an open landscape, we provide the opportunity to corporations, SMEs, pub­lic actors, investors, and stakeholders, among others, to access AI partners they can trust.