Jón Atli Elected to the National Academy of Engineering

Jón Atli Benediktsson, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Rector of the University of Iceland, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). 

Engineers can hardly receive a greater international honour than membership in the academy, which is only granted to those who have made outstanding contributions in areas such as engineering work, research; pioneering work in new and progressive technological innovations; major advances in traditional fields of engineering; the development or implementation of innovative methods in engineering education, or for demonstrating exceptional leadership in engineering. Only those engineers who have made significant contributions to humanity in their work can be admitted to the academy. 

Naturally, most members of the academy are American, and many come from the leading universities in the United States, and companies and institutions dedicated to research and work in the field of engineering.  The world-renowned MIT leads the way, followed by Stanford and Berkeley. It so happens that two Icelandic engineers now hold seats in the academy, as Bernhard Palsson, a visiting professor at the University of Iceland and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, was already a member, having been elected in 2006. 

Some of the world's most famous pioneers are in the academy, including Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and the late Steve Jobs, a pioneer at Apple. 

Jón Atli is one of the world's leading scientists in remote sensing

Jón Atli has been one of the world's leading scientists in the field of remote sensing for over a decade. His research has mainly focused on developing methods for processing remote sensing images obtained with sensors from aircraft or satellites. There is no need to elaborate on the importance of such images, they can serve to monitor environmental changes, resources, marine areas, sea ice, and various hazards in the lead-up to volcanic eruptions. 

Remote sensing images have become very complex to process in recent years.  Jón Atli and his colleagues have developed methods that have attracted significant attention worldwide, focusing on analysing the spectral and spatial information of remote sensing images.  These methods have been based on statistical methods, artificial intelligence, mathematical morphology, and machine learning.

Jón Atli is the only scientist working in Iceland on the prestigious international list (Clarivate) of the world's most influential scientists.  He has been on that list for seven consecutive years for his aforementioned research in remote sensing.  The list includes the top one percent of scientists in each field who are most cited in scientific articles published in international scientific journals. 

Jón Atli is the author of one academic book and over 400 peer-reviewed scientific articles.  He has received many international and national awards for his scientific work, including the Ása Guðmundsdóttir Wright Award, which the President of Iceland presented last week.  He was the editor-in-chief of the ISI scientific journal IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing from 2003 to 2008.  He was also the president of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society in 2011 and 2012.  Jón Atli was president of Aurora, a network of strong European universities aiming to increase the importance of innovation and research in their communities and influence improvements in university work in Europe and beyond, for about four years.   Jón Atli has been involved in innovation and co-founded the start-up company Oxymap with Professor Einar Stefánsson and others Oxymap develops technology to analyse ophthalmological images.

An Academy Working for Communities

Jón Atli will be formally inducted into the academy 5 October in the United States.  Those elected to the academy each year are chosen by the engineers who are already members. 

The academy's role includes providing objective engineering analysis of various challenges and projects that humanity faces at any given time and offering diverse advice to society in the field of engineering.  Alongside this, the academy's mission is to lead in the sciences internationally, while providing communities with insights into the complex realities of contemporary life.