iTron Seminar 2026

Accommodation: Hotel rooms at Home Hotell Grimstad can be booked using our special code. Booking link: https://n9.cl/uia-workshop

Location on campus:
March 19: Auditorium C2 036
March 20: Auditorium C2 042

Campus map: MazeMap

Kjetil Draugedalen is Chief Business Development Officer at Step Solutions, combining experience in engineering and business development with a focus on industrial automation, networking, and communication. Previously, he worked at Beckhoff Automation in product management and business development, with hands-on involvement in PC-based control systems, motion control, and industrial digitalization.

Today Kjetil Draugedalen will act as event conferencier.

Daniel Hagen is Associate Professor at the University of Agder, Director of the Norwegian Motion Laboratory, and Head of the Intelligent Mechatronics research group (iTron). His research focuses on AI-assisted engineering, digital twins, distributed control systems, and autonomous robotics. He is Co-Founder and Chairman of the Norwegian Society of Mechatronics.

Ole-Christoffer Granmo is Founding Director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR) at the University of Agder. In 2018 he created the Tsetlin Machine, for which he was awarded AI Researcher of the Decade by the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Consortium (NORA) in 2022. He has co-founded the companies Anzyz Technologies and Tsense Intelligent Healthcare.

Svein Anders Tunheim is a researcher at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR), University of Agder, where he received his Ph.D. in November 2025 exploring efficient hardware implementations of the Tsetlin Machine. He was co-founder and CTO of Chipcon, a developer of low-power radio frequency ICs, and later served as Technical Director at Texas Instruments Norway.

Marius Slagsvold is Technical Director at Step Solutions with more than 20 years of experience in industrial automation and control systems. His work focuses on the interface between operational technology and IT, including data acquisition, system structure, and long-term maintainability in production environments.

Christoffer Jørgenvåg is CEO of Hive Autonomy, working at the intersection of physical AI and autonomous industrial machines. His work focuses on enabling heavy machinery and intralogistics equipment to operate autonomously through machine-agnostic software solutions. He is a serial entrepreneur with a background in computer science and artificial intelligence, and was named Young Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young in 2016.

Nicolas Camargo Torres is Scientific Automation Engineer at Beckhoff Automation, part of the TwinCAT Product Management team since 2022. His work focuses on machine learning and industrial data analysis using Beckhoff technologies. He holds a master's degree in Automation Engineering from RWTH Aachen University.

Jonas Tønnessen is an industrial PhD candidate in Engineering Cybernetics at NTNU and robotics developer at Andersen Mekaniske Verksted (AMV) in Kristiansand. His work focuses on how autonomous and digital solutions can increase accuracy, efficiency, and safety in tunnel and mining operations. For the last seven years, AMV's R&D department has developed state-of-the-art robotic control and perception systems for these industries.

Svein-Inge Baade Ringstad is a technology leader at NOV with more than 25 years of experience in Norwegian and international industry. He has led projects in automation, digitalization, and industrial innovation at companies including NOV, Smart Inspection, and Mechatronics Innovation Lab. His work focuses on the intersection of people and technology—from offshore and maritime industries to the digital factories of tomorrow.

Sondre Sanden Tørdal is CTO and Founder of MotionTech, leveraging advanced simulation tools to accelerate development and solve complex mechatronic challenges. He first embraced simulation-driven development during his doctoral thesis at the University of Agder in 2015 and has since made it a core part of MotionTech's everyday business.

Henrik Pedersen is CEO and Co-founder of OTee, an industrial automation company developing virtual PLCs and modern software-defined workflows. OTee's technology is already running mission-critical operations and is used by engineers worldwide.

Peter Kurhajec is CTO at MTS, working at the intersection of industrial automation and modern software engineering. His work focuses on IT/OT convergence, scalable automation architectures, and improving development workflows for industrial systems. He is an active contributor to open-source automation frameworks including AX#, AXOpen, and TcOpen.

Jan Bajorat is Senior Director of Software-Defined Automation (SDA) at Siemens. After positions within SIMATIC product management, he headed the internal start-up that created SIMATIC AX and was head of STEP 7 TIA Portal. He now leads Siemens’ Software-Defined Automation initiative, focused on transforming the automation industry by bringing modern software development methods to the industrial automation space and decoupling automation capabilities from hardware.

Jakob Sagatowski is a software engineer passionate about bringing modern software development practices into the world of industrial automation. As the creator and maintainer of TcUnit, an open-source unit testing framework for TwinCAT 3, he enjoys helping developers build more reliable and maintainable systems.