I just stumbled over the 2024 Icelandic Developer Survey: Compensation, Technologies, and more that was based asking members of an Icelandic SW developer Facebook group to fill out a survey.
Having been involved in other IT-related survey's in Iceland (e.g.: The state of cybersecurity vulnerability reporting in Iceland), this is interesting work.
If page limit is an issue in scientific papers, then shortening references may be a way to squeeze out a few lines, e.g. using in the references section
IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. instead of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
This is based on the ISO 4 standard: Words such as articles (the), conjunctions (and), and prepositions (for/of/in) are generally removed and a List of Title Word Abbreviations (LTWA) is used to abbreviate common title words.
You can look up the words in the LTWA at https://www.issn.org/services/online-services/access-to-the-ltwa/.
However, that list seems not be exhaustive: I have seen journals themselves using abbreviations not contained in the LTWS.
It therefore helps to search also for the full name and add as search term iso 4 or to check whether there is a Wikipedia article that contains the ISO 4 abbreviation or to look up the journal at https://www.resurchify.com/impact/details/ or at https://paperpile.com/guides/resources/abbreviations/
On Saturday, 27. September 2024, 12:00-17:00, there was Vísindavaka 2025, the Icelandic family-friendly-during-daytime edition of European Researchers' Night 2026 at Laugardalshöll in Reykjavik.
The Computer Science department of University of Iceland had a couple of booths there, showcasing our activities in a way accessible for the general public.
Gagnabær ("Datatown") digital twin that visualises cyber attacks in Iceland. A LEGO model of Iceland representing critical infrastructure that is subject to attacks. Each time, a service on our Internet-connected computer is attacked via the Internet from anywhere in the world, a light goes off. So when all Iceland turns dark in our Lego model, then you know that all of our services are currently being attacked at the same time. We use just a dummy sample server, but in fact, it could be your computer or a power plant that is attacked. This relates to ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS).
AI trained on a supercomputer, but running locally in the browser of your smartphone.
The European Digital Innovation Hub Iceland (EDIH-IS) and the EuroCC co-funded National Competence Center (NCC) Icelandic High-Performance Computing (IHPC) provide give a glimpse into artificial intelligence by using a neural network that runs purely in your browser without any connection to a super computer. Simply use the camera of your smartphone (or laptop) to detect objects in real-time -- just open the following web page and allow your browser to use the camera: https://uice.is The used approach is a Single Shot Detector (SSD) (the percentage shows how sure the neural network is about the classification) using the Mobilenet neural network architecture. The dataset used for training is COCO (Common Objects in Context), i.e. only objects of the labeled object classes contained in COCO will get detected. The Javascript code that is running in your browser uses Tensorflow Lite and its Object Detection API and model zoo.
Another application of object detection (combined with object tracking): the organisers of the European Researcher's Night asked me to count the number of visitors by having a camera at the entrance that counts people entering and exiting. This was not showcased at a booth, but ran GDPR compliant (counting was done in real time and no video was recorded) in the background. As the camera was low resolution, the software had however some issues and was more reliable in counting people exiting than entering. Anecdotal evidence suggest, that children were not counted as these were simply too few pixels to be detected. It remains to be found out whether a higher resolution camera would improve the situation.
Beat the AI! A remote sensing demonstration that relates also to work done in EDIH-IS and IHPC where neural networks are used to classify land cover from satellite images, (Photo from Vísindavaka 2022)
In addition, we will have a booth on quantum computing -- this relates to our quantum encryption education activities as part of ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS), but also to EDIH-IS and IHPC as quantum computing might be the future of supercomputing.
Our booths at the previous European Researchers' Nights:
Parts of this event are in the context of our cybersecurity activities and the ECCC/EU co-funded projects ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS).
While I am teaching to use AI coding assistants (and emphasize the pros and cons, in particular that it helps only if you have enough knowledge to judge whether the output is correct or pure hallucination), there have been recently two studies published that give an indication that AI coding assistants do actually decrease productivity:
One aspect is that developers learn over time about the project that they are working on whereas LLMs have been trained once and will always start from scratch in a project where they are used as coding assistants.
A personal idea for future research: as there have been reports about AI slob (e.g. AI generates low-quality documents that get distributed and then take time to read and therefore, this reduces in the end productivity), it might be worthwhile to measure the impact of AI coding assistants on maintainability: if AI coding assistance would produce code that is hard to maintain, then any gains by AI coding assistants might get eaten up in future when it comes to maintenance.
We presented an update on our cybersecurity activities to industry and students at the 21st Icelandic HPC Community Workshop August 28, 2025.
We covered there the joint MSc. programme in cybersecurity, our research, and the Digital Europe Programme projects Eyvör NCC-IS, the National Coordination Centre for Cybersecurity in Iceland and Defend Iceland, including the European network of NCCs and the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre (ECCC).
This event is in the context of our cybersecurity activities and the ECCC/EU co-funded projects ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS).
The coalition agreement of the new Government that is forming aims at more digital surveillance (e.g. data retention in telecommunication, face and number plate recognition). While this is not good for privacy, at least IT security gets legal certainty:
In the Germany, there is the problem that IT security researchers who report vulnerabilities to companies (Responsible Disclosure) are sometimes sued by these companies based on a German legislation that was supposed to make breaking into IT systems a crime. I signed a petition of IT security researchers to change that legislation in order to prevent that Responsible Disclosure can be made a crime. The hope was that the currently forming government will change legislation and indeed:
The new coalition agreement covers cybersecurity at some places in an abstract manner and also includes the above legislative change:
Cyberstrafrecht, Deepfakes, Strafbarkeit Plattformbetreiber und Hackerparagraph
Wir reformieren das Cyberstrafrecht und schließen Strafbarkeitslücken, zum Beispiel bei bildbasierter sexualisierter Gewalt. Dabei erfassen wir auch Deep Fakes und schließen Lücken bei deren Zugänglichmachung gegenüber Dritten. Wir verschärfen die Sanktionsmöglichkeiten gegenüber Plattformen, insbesondere bei systemischen Mängeln bei der Entfernung strafbarer Inhalte. Wir werden im Computerstrafrecht Rechtssicherheit für IT-Sicherheitsforschung schaffen, wobei wir Missbrauchsmöglichkeiten verhindern.
Research trip/Vísindaferð is a visit to learn about companies (also as future employers) and to learn about the science behind the products that they develop. Often, these are organised by student associations as a social event.
This time, our student association Nörd visited not a company, but their teachers at the Computer Science department to learn about the research done there -- to get an idea of topics that they could do later as M.Sc. students.
I presented the following short slide deck on Software Engineering research area and the Cybersecurity M.Sc. specialisations.
The above video shows the results of the M.Sc. thesis Design and Implementation of a Buoy Positioning and Monitoring System Using Differential GNSS and LoRaWAN.
Marcel Aach defended yesterday successfully his PhD thesis on Parallel and Scalable Hyperparameter Optimization for Distributed Deep Learning Methods on High-Performance Computing Systems.
Marcel's research was rooted in the CoE RAISE project. This PhD is an example of the collaboration between the Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science and Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).
It is a great honour that six results from the EU Horizon 2020-funded Centre of Excellence for Research on AI- and Simulation-Based Engineering at Exascale (RAISE) result from University of Iceland were recognised by the EU as a 'key innovator' on the EU Innovation Radar website.
An example is LAMEC (Load AI Modules, Environments and Containers) that generates High-Performance Computing (HPC) job scripts. While job scripts are not rocket science, they are different for each HPC system and, in particular for newcomers, cumbersome to create. Therefore, LAMEC eases this with a few mouse-clicks using a web UI.
Another example is Scalable Hyperparameter Tuning to Accelerate AI Training in Reseach and Industry that directly relates to our PhD research Parallel and Scalable Hyperparameter Optimization for Distributed Deep Learning Methods on High-Performance Computing Systems
In fact, University of Iceland was involved in CoE RAISE and contributed to all of following results that are listed as innovations:
We have two research papers accepted at the 11th IEEE International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS-2024).
The program lists only paper titles -- not authors nor presenters. Our student Brynjólfur Stefánsson presented both papers at the conference.
This research is in the context of our cybersecurity activities and the ECCC/EU co-funded projects ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS).
Dr. Helmut Neukirchen
Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering
Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science
Deputy head of faculty (Autumn 2024-Spring 2026)
University of Iceland
Department of Computer Science
Gróska building, 3rd floor (stairway A or B), room 306
Bjargargata 1 (will be renamed to Kristínargata 1)
102 Reykjavik
Iceland
E-Mail: helmut at hi. is
(Encrypted e-mail welcome: my public PGP key, also available at key servers -- X.509 based S/MIME encryption possible on request.)
Phone (mobile): 615 2554
