About | Sigurður Haukur Birgisson

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Origin

Haukur, Icelandic for hawk. In primary school, everyone in Iceland received a micro:bit—a tiny programmable computer meant to teach basic coding. Most of my classmates lost interest after a week. I started collecting their discarded ones, taking them home, wiring them together, making them talk to each other. I didn't know what I was building. I just knew that when you have limited resources, you learn to make things work.

Building for Icelandic

That instinct led me to a problem most of the tech world ignores: Icelandic. A language spoken by 370,000 people. Too small for Big Tech to care about, too complex for off-the-shelf solutions. When I started working on OCR and text-to-speech systems at Miðeind, I discovered that the tools I needed didn't exist. So I learned to build them from scratch—training models on synthetic data I created myself, finding solutions in obscure papers that mainstream research had forgotten.

Now I'm finishing my AI degree at University of Groningen, still chasing the same question that hooked me as a kid: what can you build when no one's built the pieces for you?

Competitions and Community

I compete internationally in cybersecurity with Iceland's national team. I sail competitively for Iceland. And I keep shipping systems for a language the world overlooks—because someone has to, and I've been training for this since I was collecting micro:bits from kids who didn't see what I saw.

What I'm Exploring Now

Smaller-language NLP, responsible model deployment, and practical tooling: tokenization quality, evaluation for low-resource settings, and efficient inference so real people can use the models. If that resonates, let's talk.