Recent work on the nature of luck widely endorses the thesis that an event is good or bad luck for an individual only if it is significant for that individual. In this paper, I explore this thesis, showing that it raises questions about interests, well-being, and the philosophical uses of luck. In Sect. 1, I examine several accounts of significance, due to Pritchard (2005), Coffman (2007), and ...

My research is in the area of algebraic combinatorics, with an emphasis on problems from commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. The connection between algebra and combinatorics has had many implications in both fields. In combinatorics the highlights include Stanley’s proofs of the upper bound conjecture [21] and the g-theorem [22] using the theory of Cohen-Macaulay rings and toric varieti...

The recent explosion of the Internet and the rapid technological advances in gathering and storing information have resulted in huge amounts of data being collected at a very rapid rate. Developing ways to extract relevant information from such large amounts of data in a human comprehensible form and at the same time in a timely and cost effective way is of great practical importance. Approxima...

I first got introduced to research when I was an undergraduate, with Professor Sven Sigurðsson and the late Professor Kjartan G. Magnússon at the University of Iceland. I programmed and simulated a model for the migration of the Icelandic capelin (Mallotus villosus) [1], which is a small pelagic fish in the Icelandic waters [2, 3], briefly discussed below. During my graduate studies, with Profe...

Web application development is undergoing a major transition from being exclusively web-centric towards becoming more user-centric. However, to a large extent, today’s web browsers, which are poised to facilitate this enriched user experience, are far from being ready for this transition. The goal of my research is to contribute to the design and development of the next generation of web browse...

My current research interests are in structural and algorithmic graph theory – a field connecting pure mathematics with theoretical computer science. I am particularly interested in studying ways to cope with (hard) optimization problems on graphs. In these problems, it is often desirable to find a particular substructure of a graph that is optimal with respect to some criteria. A general frame...

Language is not one representation but many. A spoken utterance can be characterized as a string of phonemes, a nested set of prosodic phrases, a series of lexical items, a hierarchically-organized syntactic tree, a configuration of semantic relations, or the impetus for inferences about the speaker’s intentions. A fundamental challenge for the psychology of language is to understand the relati...

With the ever increasing popularity of web technologies, it is very common nowadays for people to discuss events, tasks and personal experiences in social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs, fora) and email. These are examples of asynchronous conversations where participants communicate with each other at different times. The huge amount of textual data generated everyday in these conversati...

Currently a new version of the distance education platform WeLearn [3] to be combined with an agent system ([1], also developed locally) for providing advanced services [2] is under development. In a previous stage of the project software was created to automatically derive keywords from documents, either from the different versions of metadata already contained (various Microsoft file formats,...