A Bridge between Academia and Industry
The Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines (IIIM / Vitvélastofnun Íslands) is a non-profit institute whose mission is to to accelerate the rate of innovation in Iceland through automation, bridging strategically between academic research and industrial engineering needs.
Focusing on all areas of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) – including robotics, machine learning, simulation techniques, and more – we develop software tools, methods, and systems exhibiting new levels of capability in numerous areas that take advantage of our expertise in cutting edge data processing, AI and other fast-growing areas in software development.
Our work has relevance across a wide range of areas in industry such as energy systems, bioinformatics, to virtual and augmented realities, and robotics. Our collaboration takes many forms, including contract work, grant proposal writing, prototyping – even basic research. Every project we undertake leverages our strong in-house expertise, project experience, and intellectual property assets, as well as a powerful knowledge network of highly qualified collaborators and experts.
Collaborator Testimonials
„The specific algorithms IIIM developed enabled us to create a product that is unique in the world.“Together with IIIM Rögg produced a software, which quickly and accurately pinpointing the location of lost hikers in the dangerous highlands of Iceland. The software was installed in the Icelandic Coast Guards’s helicopter and can make a difference between life and death by shortening the search time in Iceland’s rough conditions.
“Having a talent pool like IIIM to draw from has been very helpful to this project. We were able to bring generalized problems to them and get specific solutions to choose from. They developed for us pecific algorithms we could put straight into the software enabling us to create a product unique in the world.”
– Baldvin Hansson, founder and CEO
„IIIM’s analyses of how artificial intelligence can be used to improve the control of artificial limps could ensure that Össur stays in the frontline in their field.““The goal of those who work at Össur is to help people overcome physical obstacles and enjoy “a Life Without Limitations”. IIIM’s analyses of how artificial intelligence can be used to improve the control of artificial limps introduced us to unexplored ways to reach our goals and could ensure that Össur stays in the frontline in their field.”
„The cooperation with IIIM is very important to Mesher.“The startup company Mesher makes a smart phone app, which helps people buy clothes on the Internet. The software is based on a highly developed computer vision and AI algorithms.
“We have very tangible problems we need to convert into research questions so they can be addressed by academia and for instance utilized as final projects for students. In addition to general consultation IIIM helps the company package these technical challenges into research projects. The cooperation with IIIM is therefore very important to us.”
– Emil Harðarson, CEO & founder
Key Areas of Competence
| Software Design | Big Data | Artificial Intelligence | Complex Systems Simulations |
| • Real-time processing • Data management • Control systems • Distributed systems • Information architectures • Semantic Web • Software networks • Virtual environments • Augmented realities • Large software architectures • Automation |
• Databases • Classification • Data analysis • Machine learning • Scaling • Crypto-currency • Fine-grained parallelization • Map Reduce / Hadoop / etc. |
• Computer vision • Graphical agents & social AI • Reinforcement learning • Multi-task learning • Meta-heuristics • Reasoning & logic systems • Artificial general intelligence • Autonomous agents • Speech recognition • Natural language processing |
• Real-time systems • Networks • Finance • Forensic finance • Financial/economic analysis • Macro-economics • Banking • Software audit • Behavior analysis of complex systems • Cellular automata • Agent-based simulation |
Let us connect you with talent and opportunity
IIIM strives to optimize the match between academic and industry needs, resources and goals, relieving members from the need to be on the outlook for opportunities, technologies, projects, students and resources.
IIIM is a bridge between academia and industry, enabling academia to better relate to industrial needs, at the same time allowing industry to benefit sooner from academic results. The 3-year horizon of most product development in industry (“3”, left-hand side) is met with IIIM’s 3-9 year horizon, connecting with the most advanced products on the industrial side with the further-reaching horizon of academic projects (“9”, right-hand side), at one decade or more into the future.
Get in the fast lane
Through exchange of ideas, people, projects, and intellectual property IIIM helps companies see further into the future, bring high technology to their product lines, and produces more advanced products faster.
Collaborators
Since its establishment in 2009 IIIM has worked with a number of Icelandic high-tech companies and startups, including Össur hf, the National Commissioner of Police in Iceland, CCP, Rögg ehf, Mesher ehf, Svarmi ehf, 3Z ehf, and many others.
For startup companies IIIM offers two comprehensive startup programs, the High-Tech Highway – giving companies quick access to IIIM’s entire network of experts, and the Accelerator – a formal but easy collaboration method well suited for high-tech industry and young startups.
IIIM boasts of an extensive collaborator network both from academia and industry, including DFKI (Germany), Simula (Norway), Reykjavik University School of Computer Science. CADIA, RU’s AI lab, remains a close collaborator, a laboratory co-founded in 2005 by IIIM’s director and founder Dr. Kristinn R. Thórisson.
Founding Members
The institute was founded in collaboration with industrial and academic institutions. These are CADIA, Reykjavik University School of Computer Science and CCP. Industrial members provide challenging practical questions, while universities provide doctoral students, postdoctoral associates, and research faculty.
