Short Bio

I completed my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1999. After working in industry for 18 months, I joined the recently founded Reykjavík University, Iceland in fall 2000, where I have helped develop the School of Computer Science to its current international academic strength, and served as Dean from January 2010 to January 2014. I spent the 2015-2016 school year on a sabbatical at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. In January 2017, I joined the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where I held the position of Associate Pofessor and served as Deputy Department Head for Education from October 2020 through 2021. In July 2022, I returned to Reykjavik University, where I was promoted to a position of Full Professor.

Currently, I am working within the broad field of Multimedia Analytics, applying Multi-Dimensional Analysis concepts and techniques to multimedia. A strong focus is on interactive learning at scale, resulting in the Exquisitor prototype, which can interact with a collection of 100M images in real-time on a standard laptop. Over the last decade, my research has focused primarily on the performance of very large scale content based multimedia retrieval. This research has led to the traditional international publications and graduate degrees, but also to two patent applications and a start-up company, Videntifier Technologies. I have also studied the performance and tuning of relational database systems, particularly for novel hardware architectures. This work resulted in the development of the uFLIP benchmark for flash devices, which received the best paper award at CIDR 2009. I have taught classes on the database design and implementation, the architecture and performance of database systems, the architecture and performance of SSDs, big data management, and on advanced database systems, such as multimedia systems, stream query processing and database client caching.

I have served on the program committees on some of the major database and multimedia conferences in the world, recently including ACM Multimedia, ACM SIGMOD, EDBT and ACM ICMR. I recently served as General Chair for the SISAP 2024, MMM 2022, and ACM ICMR 2020, Technical Program Chair for the MMM 2024 and CBMI 2024 conferences, as well as Reproducibility Chair for ACM Multimedia 2025 and ICMR 2021-22, among other roles. Since since 2024, I am serving as Vice-Chair of the CBMI conferences, and as a member of the steering committee for the MMM conferences, I was recently a driving force behind its promotion to CORE rank B.

Contact Information

Office Hours: By e-mail appointment
E-mail: bjorn@ru.is
Web Page: staff.ru.is/bjorn

Mailing Address