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About

I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Iceland, a Research Scientist at Amgen deCODE, and a co-founder of KatlaCode. My group works on natural-language processing for low-resource Germanic languages, primarily Icelandic and Faroese, with adjacent work on computer vision for the natural sciences, clinical AI, and human genetics.

I trained at ETH Zurich (PhD 2017) in mathematical models of neural systems. After a postdoc in systems neuroscience and two years as a data scientist in banking, I joined the University of Iceland in 2020 to build a group around language models and datasets for under-resourced languages. The group currently has three PhD students. I previously co-founded Prescriby (2019–2023).

Beyond research

I came to research through an interest in mathematics and computer science. A long detour into neuroscience followed, asking how small, almost identical circuits give rise to the complexity of cortex. I don't expect to find the "canonical microcircuit" in my career, but the mathematical foundations laid in those early years stayed with me, and they shape how I work on language and AI today. There's an Icelandic saying for it: lengi býr að fyrstu gerð, what is first shaped lasts long.

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