Jón Atli Benediktsson, Professor of Electrical Engineering and former Rector of the University of Iceland, was recently formally inducted as an international member to the National Academy of Engineering/ NAE at the Academy’s annual meeting in Washington, DC.
He receives this honour for his contribution to the design and application of advanced machine learning and image analysis methods for information from many different data sources.
Membership in the Academy is only granted to those who have made exceptional contributions to engineering; research; innovations in novel and progressive technology; made great strides in the traditional fields of engineering; developing or implementing original methods in engineering education, or for unique leadership in engineering. The members of the Academy are engineers who have made significant contributions to humanity in their work.
There can be no doubt as to Jón Atli’s qualifications here. He has been a leading scientist in the field of remote sensing for close to two decades. His research has focused on developing methods to process information from remote sensing images obtained from sensors in aeroplanes and satellites. Such images can be utilised to observe various changes on the Earth’s surface, for example, environmental changes such as the retreat of glaciers and vegetation destruction, various risks and natural disasters, the ice cover of the sea and resource utilisation; to name but a few examples. Artificial intelligence is a growing feature in such processing, and AI was the main topic at the NAE conference, which was headlined “Our Future with Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Risks.”
Jón Atli has been a very prolific scientist. He has authored over four hundred scientific papers, held a leading role in international scientific societies in the field of remote sensing and edited international journals in the field. Jón Atli has received numerous national and international awards for his scientific work, and in recent years, he has been the only scientist operating in Iceland on the Clarivate list of the world’s most influential scientists; the list only contains the top one per cent of scientists in each field who are most cited in international scientific journals.
Jón Atli has also worked hard on various innovations. He founded the startup Oxymap with Professor Einar Stefánsson and others. This company focuses on technology to analyse ophthalmological images.
By joining the NAE, Jón Atli becomes part of a group of highly respected engineers and pioneers; among them Bill Gates, the leader of Microsoft, and the late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple.
Jón Atli is the second Icelander to be elected to the Academy, the other one is Bernharð Pálsson, visiting professor at the University of Iceland and Professor at the University of California in San Diego, elected to the Academy in 2006.
A recording of the election of new members to the NAE can be found on YouTube, Jón Atli accepts his election in minute 44.
Further information on the NAE induction ceremony.