Jóhanna Vigdís Guðmundsdóttir

As the CEO of Almannarómur – Centre for Language Technology Iceland, Jóhanna Vigdís Guðmundsdóttir led a 14m EUR investment in language technology and artificial intelligence from 2018 and 2023. There she was responsible for a team of 60 specialists and scientists within various fields, with whom the institution built the infrastructure of language technology for Icelandic. At the end of the project’s lifecycle, she led the collaboration of the Icelandic state with Microsoft and OpenAI, resulting in Icelandic being the only language besides English to be trained in the large language model GPT-4, and thus usable in the ChatGPT service. Prior to Almannarómur, Jóhanna was an executive director at Reykjavík University, she led the Reykjavík Arts Festival, and was a director of investor relations at Straumur Investment Bank. She holds an MBA degree from Reykjavík University, MSc in cultural studies from Edinburg University, BA in literature from the University of Iceland, and has finished the Advanced Management Program from IESE Business School in Barcelona. She is a member of the Nordic Ethical AI Group, appointed by the Nordic Council of Ministers, the chairman of the board of Save the Children Iceland, she was a member of the Steering Committee developing a comprehensive innovation policy for Iceland, appointed by the Minister for Innovation and Industry, 2018-19, sat on the board of Directors at the Central Bank of Iceland from 2018-2022, and was on the board of Directors at Festa, Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility from 2012-14. Jóhanna was an alternate member of the Icelandic Parliament from 2017 to 2020.