About

I am a professor of computer science at Reykjavik University. Most of my career has been in the theory of algorithms, and that work has its own home at magnusmh.is. This site is for the other half: what AI is doing to university education, and what I am doing about it at RU. I chair the university’s Curriculum Council, teach a first-year course built around active, group-based problem-solving, and run a number of efforts to get colleagues oriented in a fast-moving field.

Each dispatch here is a short public summary of one of those efforts, written when it reaches a state worth reporting. The rule for what appears is simple: my own positions, public outputs, and outlines. Nothing from behind closed doors, and colleagues only get a nod.

How these are written

The dispatches are drafted with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, working from my own notes, scripts and records. I read every draft, correct it, and sign it off before it appears; nothing is published that I have not been through. The positions are mine, the first draft usually is not, and I would rather say so than have it inferred.

Why “vélgreind”

The usual Icelandic word for artificial intelligence is gervigreind, where gervi- means artificial in the sense of fake or imitation. I think that prefix has aged badly. Vélgreind, machine intelligence, says what the thing is without passing judgment on it, and it follows the older coinage vitvél (intelligent machine) that the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines, Vitvélastofnun Íslands, has used for years.

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There is an Atom feed. Dispatches are also announced on LinkedIn.