Language and Voice Lab

Dr. Hrafn Loftsson – hrafn@ru.is
Publications
Hrafn is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. degree in Natural Language Processing (NLP) from University of Sheffield in 2007. Hrafn’s research focuses on the development of language resources and support tools, with an emphasis on the Icelandic language.

Dr. Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson – hannes@ru.is
Publications
Hannes Högni is a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. degree in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT in 2003. His research focuses on virtual humans, interactive virtual environments, and dialogue systems, with an emphasis on social interaction.

Dr. Jón Guðnason – jg@ru.is
Publications
Jon is an Associate Professor at the Department of Engineering. He received his Ph.D. degree in Signal Processing from Imperial College London in 2007. His studies focus on on the nature of the voice source and the voice production, and what effect it has on speech applications such as recognition and synthesis.

Dr. Stefán Ólafsson – stefanola@ru.is
Publications – CV
Stefán is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. degree in Personal Health Informatics from Northeastern University in 2021. He conducts research in the fields of NLP, intelligent virtual agents, and digital health.

Dr. Carlos Daniel Hernández Mena – carlosm@ru.is
Publications
Carlos works on projects in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). He has a Bachelor Degree in Electronics, a Master Degree in Computer Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Signal Processing with Specialty in ASR. During his Postdoc in the University of Malta, Carlos developed ASR Systems, tools, and Datasets for Maltese.

Dr. Caitlin Laura Richter – caitlinr@ru.is
Publications
Caitlin received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, researching language acquisition, cognitive modelling, and computational phonetics. She is interested in how both people and computers learn and process representations of language variation. Her current work focuses on computer-assisted pronunciation training in Icelandic and a spoken dialog framework for Icelandic.

Helga Svala Sigurðardóttir – helgas@ru.is
Thesis: Language Technology Project – Automatic Speech Recognition
Publications
Helga holds a M.Sc. degree in machine learning with a focus on language technology and a B. Sc. in computational computer science with the same focus. Before that, Helga studied music with another focus.

Jón Friðrik Daðason – jond19@ru.is
Thesis: Language Representation Models for Low and Medium-Resource Languages
Publications
Jón is a PhD student working on pre-trained language models for low and medium-resource languages, with a focus on data-efficient pretraining techniques. His research interests include language modelling, text mining, spelling correction, morphological analysis and language technology for historical texts.

Steinþór Steingrímsson – steinthor18@ru.is
Thesis: Effectively Aligning and Filtering Parallel Corpora under Sparse Data Conditions
Publications
Steinþór is a PhD student working on machine translation. He is interested in data augmentation for low-resource machine translation and machine translation for morphologically rich languages. Steinþór also works at Árnastofnun, building and maintaining text corpora and other language resources.

Guolin Fang – guolin19@ru.is
Guolin is a Ph.D. student working on Text-to-Speech (TTS). His field research include vocoder, signal processing and machine learning. He has a M.Sc in Natural Language Processing from Reykjavík University in 2021 and a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Iceland in 2017.

Gunnar Thor Örnólfsson – gunnaro@ru.is
Publications
Gunnar works on projects related to Text-to-Speech (TTS). He has a M.Sc. in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh in 2019 and a B.Sc. in Software Engineering from the University of Iceland in 2017. In his free time, Gunnar Thor is an avid choral singer and also sings in a barbershop quartet.

Þorsteinn Daði Gunnarsson – thorsteinng@ru.is
Projects: Language Technology Project – Text to speech
Publications
Þorsteinn conducts research on Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems. He completed his B.Sc in Computer Science form the University of Iceland in 2014 and a M.Sc. in Machine Learning from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, in 2019. He joined the LVL team in 2020.

Bjarni Barkarson – bjarnibar@ru.is
Publication
Bjarni works on the National Language Technology Platform (NLTP) and Microservices at your service: bridging the gap between NLP research and industry projects. He has an MA in General Linguistics from the University of Iceland and an MA in Language Technology from the University of Iceland.

Hlynur Davíð Hlynsson – hlynurh@ru.is
Publications
Hlynur is currently working on a project for applying machine learning to clinical diagnoses. Research interests include deep learning, representation learning, data efficiency and reinforcement learning.

Ragnar Pálsson – raggipals@gmail.com
Ragnar has a masters degree in Mathematical Modelling from the Technical University of Denmark. He joined LVL in april of 2021 and his work currently focuses on computer assisted pronunciation training in Icelandic and a spoken dialogue framework for Icelandic. His interest lie in data science, machine learning, numerical algorithms and scientific computing.

Stefán Gunnlaugur Jónsson – stefangj@ru.is
Stefán works on evaluating Text-to-Speech systems. He has a Masters Degree in Data Science from Eindhoven University of Technology. He has worked at the Language and Voice Lab at Reykjavík University in some capacity since 2018 and full time since 2021, mostly in software development. His interests lie in data science, machine learning, Reinforcement learning, algorithms, podcasting and content creating