Various projects at RU funded by the Icelandic Student Innovation Fund

Students at Reykjavik University will this summer work on research projects organized by RU and various institutions and companies, with support from the Icelandic Student Innovation Fund. A total of six projects at RU, involving eighteen students in total, received funding from the fund this year.

The research projects are very diverse. The project Advancing anatomy education with VR and 3D models is supervised by Dr. Paolo Gargiulo, professor at the Department of Engineering. The project aims to develop a web-based platform, that includes patient specific 3D models and VR simulations to advance medical educational programs in Icelandic Universities.

This project will significantly impact health education in Iceland, fostering technological advancement and innovative educational tools for learning anatomy, pathologies and training surgical procedures. Thanks to an existing agreement with LSH, we will collect MRI/CT data from various body parts, including challenging and pathological cases, to construct a comprehensive database, that offers 3D regional systematic views of the human body.

Goal-Setting and Motivation Systems in Bati and Youth and Social Media Use

The project Features for Goal-Setting and Motivation Systems in Bati, supervised by Dr. Stefán Ólafsson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, is being carried out in collaboration with the company Rekovy and treatment centers such as SÁÁ.

Students are involved in developing new features for the app Bati, such as a personalized motivation system and goal-setting functionality, as well as conducting user testing. The project applies the latest approaches from gamification, behavioral economics, and user-centered design, with the goal of increasing treatment adherence and improving the quality of life for individuals struggling with addiction.
The project Brain Activity in Youth During Social Media Use is supervised by Dr. Þórhildur Halldórsdóttir, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology.

The aim of the study is to examine the effects of social media and video game use on brain activity in children aged 10–16, a topic that has received little research attention. Students working on the project will be involved in tasks such as programming and data processing, participant recruitment, and data collection.

Blockchain, Signal Fusion and Smali

The project Educational Blockchain: A Step Towards Equality is supervised by Hafsteinn Hjartarson, PhD student at the Department of Computer Science, and is in collaboration with the University of Iceland, Red Cross, Digital Iceland and the FinTech Cluster.

Academic institutions rely on outdated methods like paper, email, and PDFs for academic certificates. These processes create unnecessary workloads, are slow, and rely on centralized databases, risking data loss and forgery. EduChain addresses these issues by using blockchain to store academic data by drawing from previously proposed solutions such as MIT's BlockCert and Ukraine's EDEBO System while ensuring scalability on a global level.

The project Neural Architecture Search for Signal Fusion is supervised by Dr. María Óskarsdóttir, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Physiological signal data is complex and difficult to analyze, but deep learning is often used to detect patterns in such data.

However, combining multiple signals into a single model remains a challenge, and signal fusion is a method used to integrate various physiological signals into one deep learning model. This requires complex design work, which is both time-consuming and highly specialized.

In this project, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) will be used to automate the fusion process and predict sleep stages based on sleep monitoring data. The students will implement NAS on Elja, Iceland’s national university supercomputer, where they will set up experimental measurements and automated workflows.

Lastly, the project Smali, supervised by Dr. Torfi Þórhallsson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering, also received funding from the Icelandic Student Innovation Fund.