Vilhjalmur (Villi) Thorsteinsson

Summary

Entrepreneur in the software, telecom, IT and video games industries for more than four decades. Co-founder of Iceland Software Inc. 1983, sold to CODA Group plc 1996, acquired by Baan N.V. 1998. Wrote large parts of a compiler for the Ada programming language in 1984-6. Served as Lead Architect for Common Technologies division of Baan. Co-founded Homeportal, Inc. (now called Extrada Ltd.) 2000. Board member and chairman of CCP Games, makers of EVE Online, 2004-2013. Founder and chairman of Miðeind, a software company specializing in AI and NLP for the Icelandic language. Notably, Miðeind partnered with OpenAI for the initial launch of GPT-4 in March 2023 to enhance the model's support of the Icelandic language. Investor in and occasional board member of several startup companies in IT and related industries, including CCP (multiplayer online worlds, sold to Pearl Abyss), GreenQloud (cloud storage, sold to NetApp), DataMarket (analytics, sold to Qlik) and Verne Global (datacenters, sold to Digital 9 Infrastructure). Was also a board member and investor in Icelandic financial services company Virðing (previously Auður Capital) which merged into Kvika bank. Co-author of several peer-reviewed papers in the field of natural language processing, most recently one presented at ACL 2023. Author of an NLP parser and a Context-Free Grammar for the Icelandic language. Author of a number of open-source packages on GitHub, written in Python, C++ and Golang. Previously a board member of numerous Nordic software, telecommunications and IT companies, private and public, including Kögun, OgVodafone, Opin Kerfi, Hands ASA and Skýrr (now Advania). Elected in a public election as one of 25 representatives at a Constitutional Assembly to rewrite the Icelandic Constitution. Served as Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Fundamental Institutions of Government. Served as Chairman of the Council's Procedural Committee, championing the use of agile methods and social media to engage the public in the process of writing a new Constitution. Served as chairman and member of government-appointed committees in the fields of energy policy, interconnecting Iceland and the European electricity market via a submarine cable, and inflation indexing. Specialties: Board-level management of public and private companies in the IT space. Venture capital investment and nurturing of start-up companies. Processes for constitutional reform. Energy policy.