Courses I currently teach or have developed at the University of Iceland. Roughly 300+ students per academic year across these courses.
AI and Leadership
MSc · Icelandic
Course in the Executive MBA programme at the University of Iceland on artificial intelligence for working leaders. Participants learn what current AI systems can and cannot do, where AI is useful in the everyday work of leadership (data, decision-making, employee performance and well-being, and the leader's own development), and what ethical questions come with putting AI to work inside a business. Classes include direct work with generative AI tools. Co-taught in 2025 with Sigrún Gunnarsdóttir, a servant-leadership researcher; taught alone in 2026. In Icelandic.
Taught: 2025, 2026
Introduction to Deep Learning
MSc · English
Master's introduction to deep neural networks, covering backpropagation, model training and regularisation, and architectures used for image, audio, and text. Generative, adversarial, and sequential models are part of the syllabus, with PyTorch as the implementation language throughout. Students present a paper or project of their own from the field as part of the assessment. Taught in English.
Taught: Fall 2025
Large Language Models in an Icelandic Context
MSc · Icelandic
Master's course at the School of Humanities asking how well large language models work in Icelandic and what their behaviour says about both the models and human language. Topics include methods for evaluating LLM linguistic competence in Icelandic, the risks that come with widespread chatbot use in smaller language communities (misinformation, bias and prejudice), and what cross-linguistic performance suggests about the way children and machines acquire language. Lead instructor: Iris Edda Nowenstein. Taught in Icelandic.
Taught: Spring 2026
Natural Language Processing (Business Intelligence module)
MSc · English
Two-week module on natural language processing taught inside the Business Intelligence master's course at the School of Business, where Helga Ingimundardóttir is the lead instructor. The module covers text preprocessing, embeddings, classification, named-entity recognition, and the use of large language models in analyst workflows. Taught in English.
Taught: Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024
The AI Lifecycle
MSc · English
Master's course on the full lifecycle of a production AI system: gathering and preparing data, feature selection, training models, evaluating them, putting them into production, serving them as services, and monitoring and maintaining them once live. The semester is built around three larger team projects in which student teams compete to build the best working solution.
Taught: Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024, Spring 2025, Spring 2026
Analysis of Algorithms
BSc / MSc · English
Algorithm design and analysis, taught as a bridge course between the BSc and MSc programmes in computer science. Covers asymptotic complexity, algorithms for sorting and searching, graph algorithms and matrix computation, and the standard design strategies of divide-and-conquer, greedy methods, and dynamic programming. The course closes with the basics of intractability: NP-completeness, approximation algorithms, and randomised algorithms. Co-taught with Steinn Guðmundsson and Páll Melsted on a rotating basis. Taught in English.
Taught: Spring 2021, Spring 2023, Spring 2025
Computers, Operating Systems and Digital Literacy
BSc · Mixed
Self-study BSc course developed in 2020 and modelled on MIT's "Missing Semester of your CS Education". Covers computer organisation, operating-systems basics, and the command-line and tooling skills students need across the rest of the degree. Designed for both Icelandic and international students to work through at their own pace.
Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science
BSc · Mixed
First-year course covering the discrete-math foundations used throughout the rest of the computer-science degree: propositions and predicate logic, set theory and Boolean algebra, induction and recursion, counting and basic algorithm analysis, relations and their representations, trees and graphs, and the basics of strings, finite automata, and formal grammars. Enrolment runs 200–230 students per cohort, a mix of Icelandic and international students.
Taught: Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2023