He received a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Iceland (2005) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University (2009), where he researched ways to exploit group similarity and improve scalability in distributed systems. His dissertation was nominated for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award by Cornell. Before his appointment at Reykjavik University, Ymir was a post-doctoral scientist at IBM Research - Haifa (2009-2011). Ymir's research projects include creating and optimizing systems and algorithms for distributed settings, and getting multicast and content distribution to work in a variety of environments. His work has been partially supported by a Fulbright Scholarship, a Yahoo! Research grant and a Grant-of-Excellence from the Icelandic Research Center. In his spare time, Ymir plays the piano, dances ballroom and flies small airplanes.