Recent content in Who Am I? on James Robb
The 29th of August is approaching and more and more blogs and opinion pieces I see are discussing the case for and against Iceland having accession talks with the EU. Reading some of the pieces written by friends and former colleagues stirred me up enough to want to discuss the issue myself. I am voting yes. This isn’t a comprehensive case for yes - I would be speaking well outside of what…
While visiting a friend recently he mentioned that he dropped his tablet and hasn’t been able to get it to turn on since. As it usually goes in such situations, there were no backups to speak of. The tablet was his daily driver and held a bunch of writing and photos that he wanted to recover, if possible. Not being a techy himself, and hesitant to throw hundreds of dollars at repair services…
Each new generation of LLMs delivers a smaller leap than the one before. Improvements do come, but they’re increasingly incremental. Most of the progress we are seeing now is around tooling - coding agents like Codex and Claude Code are changing the way much (if not most) software is being built today. But that’s an entirely different thing than the AGI that was just around the corner…
I recently wrote an opinion piece I had published on Vísir’s website (a popular news outlet in Iceland). In it I discuss my feelings on the state funding for playschools in Reykjavík and urge voters to choose political parties that understand and value the importance of adequately funding playschools. The article on Vísir is published in Icelandic - the English version is below. English…
Introduction # One of the first things I needed to do this year was find a new job. The last company I worked for had a huge round of layoffs in November of last year, and I was one of the people that was let go. I took a couple of months to spend time with my family and travel, but sigh , it’s time to get back to it. To aid me in my hunt, I “built” Sigh to help me track all of…
Introduction # The last big project I worked on during my time at Yellowbrick was a brand new observability stack for the core product, an OLAP data warehouse. The company had finished a big push to create a cloud version of the product (which up to that point ran on a custom appliance) and we were finding that our mostly log-driven approach to observability was falling short. Diagnosing…
My master’s thesis is based on my paper Nested, but Separate: Isolating Unrelated Critical Sections in Real-Time Nested Locking . It provides a much more thorough background on real-time locking to make the material accessible to a wider computer science audience. Master’s Thesis PDF
Björn Brandenburg and I introduced a novel fined-grained nested-locking protocol for real-time systems under clustered scheduling. Our protocol provides temporal isolation for latency-sensitive tasks that access (possibly) nested resources while remaining asymptotically optimal. The paper is published in the proceedings of the 32nd Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS). ECRTS Paper PDF…
Sigurður Helgason and I explore in our bachelor’s thesis, Identifying Combinatorial Structures for Binary Strings and Set Partitions , how to build combinatorial specifications for avoidance classes of binary strings and set partitions. Building upon the work of Bean et al. and the CombSpecSearcher system, we show that we can find a combinatorial specification for any avoidance class of…
Let’s start with the final product! This is a digital picture frame I built (with my classmate Gunnar) for our Embedded Systems and IoT course at Reykjavik University. It’s also going to be my wife’s Christmas present, so we made sure to put a lot of extra love and care into it. We used a Raspberry Pi, an LCD panel from a laptop, and some other hobbyist components I’ll go…
I created a convolutional neural network and a set of complementary utilities for optical character recognition with two classmates in my Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course at Reykjavik University. In particular, I focused on reconstructing water damaged documents written in the Ukrainian language. We used Tensorflow for the neural network and the code is published on GitHub .…
In collaboration with others in the Pirate Party of Iceland, I created Safety Valve. Safety Valve is a platform that allows the residents of Iceland to act as a shadow parliament of sorts. Each bill currently moving through Icelandic parliament is converted into a petition. Residents can then digitally sign for or against each petition using their Ice Key, a digital authentication mechanism…
Introduction # I built a word clock in the Icelandic Language as a Christmas gift for my wife. I had a ton of fun building it and learned a lot along the way. It was also featured in the local paper . This is the final product. The clock reads “klukkan er fimmtán mínútur yfir þrjú” which literally translates to “the clock is fifteen minutes over three” (or said as a native…
My father and I purchased a 1977 Kawasaki KZ650 in need of some TLC from some family members in southern Manitoba after I had expressed an interest in motorcycles. My father was a seasoned biker and I learned a lot from him throughout the process. The motorcycle technically ran when we purchased it, but not very well. After a year of learning and a considerable amount of elbow grease, I had a…
My CV and LinkedIn page are largely mirrors of each other. PDF LinkedIn