Cornelia Bjørke-Hill is Communications Lead at Microsoft Norway, driving strategic narratives that connect global innovation with local impact. With over a decade in communications, including eight years as comms director within the HR tech industry, and more than 20 years in broadcast journalism for leading Norwegian media, Cornelia brings deep expertise in storytelling and trust-building. At Microsoft, she focuses on making AI relevant for Norway by translating global technology trends into meaningful value creation.

Title: Reinventing Communication with AI

Abstract:

In her talk, “Reinventing Communications with AI,” she reveals how intelligent tools amplify creativity and impact—without losing the human touch. Through real-world examples from her own craft, Cornelia demonstrates how AI can transform manual tasks into a strategic advantage, helping organizations communicate with clarity, authenticity, and purpose while using AI to use the human brain where it delivers the most impact.

Maxim Salnikov is a tech and cloud community enthusiast based in Oslo. With over two decades of experience as a web developer, he shares his extensive knowledge of the web platform, cloud computing, and AI by speaking at and providing training for developer events worldwide. By day, Maxim plays a crucial role in supporting the development of cloud and AI solutions within European companies, serving as the Senior Solution Engineer at Microsoft focusing on the AI-native developer tools & platforms. During evenings, he can be found running events for Norway’s largest web and cloud development communities. Maxim is passionate about exploring and experimenting with Generative AI possibilities, including AI-assisted development.

Title: AI Agents in Action: Transforming Work in Media & Entertainment

Abstract:

As the media and entertainment industry faces unprecedented change, organizations are turning to AI agents to boost productivity, address workforce capacity gaps, and unlock new value. This session explores how AI agents are reshaping roles, workflows, and leadership.

Daniel Catalán is a full professor of communication with nearly 20 years of experience in research and field work. He has held positions in major international organisations, including WHO, ECDC, and UNHCR, and currently directs the UC3M MediaLab. Author of over 200 publications with more than 4,000 citations (h-index = 34), he has led and participated in numerous national and international research projects. His work focuses on media effects, health misinformation, risk communication, and public understanding of digital technologies. In October 2025, he chaired the European Congress on Disinformation and Fact-Checking, which gathered more than 450 delegates from 58 countries.

Title: Beyond facts: Messaging strategies to counter health misinformation

Abstract:

Facts often fail to change perceptions or beliefs based on health misinformation. Our experimental research explores alternative messaging strategie, such as narrative storytelling and humour, to improve engagement, build trust, and foster dialogue with skeptical audiences. We examine how different ways of framing health messages affect credibility perceptions, emotional response, and behavioural intentions. Our results show that messages that feel personal and emotionally engaging make people more open and less defensive, and they work better than messages based only on data and statistics. The presentation will also share practical lessons for communicators and health organisations on how to create messages that are persuasive and trustworthy.

Bart Goethals is full professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Antwerp in Belgium where he leads the Adrem Data Lab, which performs fundamental research on artificial intelligence and data science.

He is founder and CEO of Froomle, a university spin-off company that provides a Recommender Systems Platform to the News and Media industry.

His primary research interests are the study of data mining and recommender systems. He received several awards for his theoretical studies on frequent itemset mining. He was general chair of IEEE ICDM 2012 and program chair of ECML PKDD 2008, and SIAM DM 2010 and will be program chair of ACM RecSys 2026.

He has served as general chair of the ECML PKDD Steering Committee, action editor of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal, and associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems, IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering, the Knowledge and Information Systems journal, and Recommender Systems Section Editor of Frontiers on Big Data, and he was Editor-in-Chief of the ACM SIGKDD Explorations newsletter.

Title: Conversational and Understandable News 

Abstract:

In this talk, I present Froomle Voice, a personalised conversational news assistant that delivers news tailored to individual interests, and our recent work on making recommendations understandable — to increase transparency, user trust, and editorial oversight. The presentation will demonstrate these technologies and discuss their implications for responsible AI in the media sector.

Ingmar Weber is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor for AI and Chair for Societal Computing at Saarland University. His work looks at how data and AI can be used to understand and support social development. Previously, he held positions at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, Yahoo Research Barcelona, and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He is among the 2% of most cited researchers and is currently leading a EUR 29M initiative to use novel data sources to measure societal phenomena and to support timely decision making.

Title: Slow AI: When the Journey is the Destination

Abstract: A common software design mantra is “don’t make the user think”. Using software should be effortless and help get the user’s job done as quickly as possible. While this is often desirable, this efficiency-first approach can be detrimental for democracies where engagement with societal discussions, rather than just ticking a box should be the goal. In our group, we explore how “slow AI” could be used to make people think more, not less. Examples range from using LLMs for informing voters during elections, to a debate-yourself setup to promote tolerance.

I am the Don and Mibs Follett professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech where I lead the Social Technologies research group and serve as the associate dean for faculty affairs. Previously, I was an assistant professor at Rutgers SC&I, led a research team at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, and got a PhD from Stanford. Before all that, I played professional basketball in Israel. I sometimes consult or even co-found startups.

My research focus is on topics related to Technology, Media and Democracy, and in particular the trustworthiness of our information ecosystem. We use a wide range of tools—from machine learning, to computational social science, to online experiments, to qualitative methods—to understand and try to address these challenges, with an increasing focus on the impact of AI-mediated communication. Our sponsors over the years included, among others, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and the National Science Foundation.

Title: Integrating AI into Platform Writing Tasks? Not So Fast

Abstract:

Online platforms increasingly integrate LLM-based writing tools, raising questions about GenAI’s impact on individuals’ content production and outcomes. In this project, we had a unique opportunity to measure the impact of such tool introduced by Change.org, an online petition platform. The results provide causal evidence that in-platform AI writing tools can profoundly reshape online content, but the tools practical utility for improving desired outcomes may be less beneficial than anticipated, and they introduce unintended consequences like content homogenization. This finding adds to a growing body of work showing the potential impact of AI-mediation communication on media.

Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. She leads the project AI STORIES: Narrative Archetypes of Artificial Intelligence, which is funded by an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. Jill’s books include Machine Vision: How Algorithms are Changing the Way We See the World (Polity 2023) and Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (2014). She is currently a member of an expert committee for Teknologirådet’s report on artificial intimacy, and is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences.

Title: AI-generated stories: the nostalgia of large language models

Abstract: What are the dominant narratives of generative AI, and what is at stake in their circulation? The AI STORIES project starts from the hypothesis that LLMs replicate and perhaps increase certain narrative patterns, which could mean that we lose diversity in storytelling. Research so far suggests this is true – the thousands of AI-generated stories we have analysed in the AI STORIES project emphasise stability and nostalgia, telling remarkably similar stories of threatened communities saved by reconnecting with heritage. LLMs also excel at simile and at affirmation, generating additive texts – more and more and more – rather than critical analysis. What does this mean for media, journalism and research?