The institution that represents the highest honor for American engineers, Na Xin.
On the morning of February 10, Beijing time, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced the list of additional academicians of the National Academy of Engineering in 2021, and a total of 111 academicians and 22 foreign academicians were selected this time.
What is remarkable is that there are a number of influential figures in the technology industry in this list, including Tesla founder Elon Musk, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Nadella, Zhang Hongjiang, chairman of Beijing Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Sanjay Mehrotra, president and CEO of Micron Technology, and Kathleen Bergeron, vice president of Hardware Engineering of Apple.
At present, the total number of academicians of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States has reached 2388, and the number of international academicians has reached 310.
According to public information, the National Academy of Engineering was established in December 1964, is the top academic institution in the American engineering community, and is one of the four major national academic institutions in the United States (the other three are the National Academy of Sciences NAS, the National Medical College NAM and the National Science Foundation NSF).
Why was Musk elected to the Academy?
Elected National Academy of Engineering is one of the highest professional honors for experts in the field of engineering, recognizing "significant contributions to engineering research, practice, education, etc.", "pioneering work in emerging fields of technology and significant contributions in traditional engineering fields", and "innovative contributions to the development/implementation of engineering education". Voting for new members takes place each year in December, and the final vote on membership takes place in January.
NAE Chairman John M. Anderson announced today that the total number of U.S. members and 310 international members has reached 2,388 after the addition of this issue. The qualifications of the new academicians will take effect at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Engineering on October 2, 2022.
On the reasons for Musk's election to the Fellowship, NAE wrote: SpaceX founder, CEO and principal engineer Elon Musk has made breakthroughs in the design, engineering, manufacturing and operation of reusable launch vehicles and sustainable transportation and energy systems.
After the announcement of the selection, Musk quickly expressed his gratitude in social networks:
Some people think that Musk's selection as a member of the Academy of Engineering is well deserved, and some people question it.
This extremely capable person, in fact, the highest degree is only a bachelor's degree. According to public information, Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in June 1971, entered Queen's College in Canada in 1990, and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, where he received a bachelor's degree in physics in 1995. Musk was admitted to Stanford University's Ph.D. program in materials science, but he dropped out of school after only two days of enrollment to devote himself to Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
Currently, Musk has titles including, but not limited to, SpaceX founders, CEOs, and chief engineers; Tesla CEOs and chief designers; Boring Company founders; neuralink, openAI co-founders. He is currently worth about $241 billion (mostly Tesla stock) and is the richest man in the world.
Although there are frequent achievements in the industrial field, in the eyes of some people, Musk's views and practices are often out of line, including coin speculation and social network talk. On February 7, Tesla said it had recorded an impairment loss of $101 million (about 642 million yuan) due to changes in the book value of bitcoin. Under the "speculation" loss, the 10-K annual report document disclosed that Tesla also received a subpoena from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which may be inseparable from Musk's remarks on social platforms.
NASA has some concerns about Musk's Starlink program
It is worth noting that Musk's identity as a member of the elected academician this time is "SpaceX founder, CEO and chief engineer", although the announcement emphasizes SpaceX and does not mention Tesla, there is no doubt that "sustainable transportation and energy systems" refers to Tesla's achievements.
However, spaceX has been in trouble lately.
In 2002, Musk officially founded SpaceX, a space exploration technology company. SpaceX aims to reduce the cost of rocket launches and realize the dream of Martian colonization.
On February 22, 2018, SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket and put two small experimental communication satellites into orbit. This is the beginning of Musk's ambitious global Internet satellite deployment plan, the "Starlink" project.
Source: SpaceX official website
According to media reports, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) expressing concern about SpaceX's second-generation Starlink program.
Musk's SpaceX has previously obtained authorization for about 12,000 satellites, and has requested the FCC to authorize the launch of the second-generation starlink system, which will launch about 30,000 more satellites.
NASA wrote in the letter that the agency is concerned that as the number of satellites deployed by the Starlink program increases, the probability of a collision event could increase significantly, with implications for NASA's science and manned space missions.
NASA cites data that the total number of objects currently tracked in orbit around the earth is 25,000 (including satellites and various types of space junk), and SpaceX's second-generation starlink program will more than double the number of tracked objects in orbit.
Musk revealed on Twitter last month that SpaceX currently has 1469 satellites active and 272 satellites are about to enter orbit.
Previously, SpaceX's competitor Amazon has expressed similar concerns, Amazon complained to the FCC that StarChain's satellites can operate at the same altitude as the Kuiper system (Amazon's satellite project), and the risk of overlapping orbits will greatly increase the risk and other burdens of the Kuiper system, and require the FCC to impose reasonable conditions.
SpaceX announced on Wednesday that the company launched 49 satellites on February 3, but due to the attack of the solar storm the next day, as many as 40 satellites were lost due to the storm and burned up in the Earth's atmosphere.
Representatives of other newly promoted academicians
Dr. Zhang Hongjiang was elected as a foreign academician
Also selected were Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, LG Energy Solutions Michigan President Gray Denise, and General Electric's Head of Smart Grid Business McDonald John.
Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella was named a Fellow, as he was named a Fellow, because of his contributions to advancing enterprise computing infrastructure as a cloud service, as well as his international leadership in socio-technical systems and practices.
Satya Nadella
Born in 1967, Nadella earned a bachelor's degree in engineering in electronics and communications from Mengorol University in India, followed by a study in the United States, a master's degree in computer science at the University of Wisconsin, and an MBA at the University of Chicago.
In the critical period of Microsoft's transformation, Nadella, who was elected CEO of Microsoft in 2014, can be said to be able to turn the tide, leading Microsoft, which originally missed opportunities such as search and mobile, to successfully enter the enterprise and cloud computing markets. Today, Microsoft is the world's second largest public company after Apple in terms of market capitalization, with a latest market capitalization of more than $2.3 trillion.
The recent sensational Microsoft announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard for nearly $70 billion, which is also the hand of Nadella. Nadella said in an exclusive interview with foreign media that this transaction will provide the cornerstone for the "meta-universe" business and become the core of future online interaction.
Kathleen Bergeron, vice president of hardware engineers from Apple, and James A. Yurko, director of materials engineering, were selected as fellows.
▲Kathleen Bergeron
Among them, Kathleen Bergeron was selected for his commitment to innovative design inventions and engineering product realizations. She led the team to create Hardware products such as Apple input devices and HomePods, and is a well-known female technical representative within Apple; James A. Yurko was selected for her contribution to accelerating the development of materials for consumer electronics.
Intel Researcher Ravindranath Vithal Mahajan was named a Member of the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to advanced microelectronic packaging architectures and their thermal management. Retired former Intel World Ahead Program Vice President John Davies was also selected for his contributions to the field of computer technology.
Sanjay Mehrotra, also named president and CEO of Micron Technologies, was born in 1958 and co-founder of SanDisk, the world's largest supplier of flash data storage card products.
▲Sanjay Mehrotra
He was named CEO of Micron Technology in February 2017 and President of the Semiconductor Industry Association of America in 2019. He was selected as a fellow for his contributions to the design and architecture of non-volatile memory and the support for multi-level cell NAND flash memory products.
In the list of overseas academicians this year, Dr. Zhang Hongjiang, chairman of the Beijing Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, was elected for his outstanding technical contributions and leadership in the field of multimedia computing.
Zhang Hongjiang was the CEO of Kingsoft, the president of Microsoft Asia Engineering Institute, the chief technology officer of Microsoft Asia Pacific R&D Group, the first ten "outstanding scientists" of Microsoft, one of the founders and vice presidents of Microsoft Research Asia, and is currently the chairman of Beijing Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and the investment partner of Source Code Capital.
▲Dr. Zhang Hongjiang
He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Zhengzhou University in 1982. He then received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Danish University of Science and Technology in 1991. As a PhD student at the Danish University of Technology, he chose remote sensing image processing as his research direction and eventually became a disciplinary leader in video retrieval and query.
He was awarded the 2010 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, the 2012 ACM Multimedia Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, and the 2008 Outstanding Asian American Engineer Award. He has published nearly 400 academic papers, edited several academic monographs, and was selected as one of the "Top 1000 Scientists in the Global H-Index for Computer Science and Electronics 2020" published by Guide2research and ranked 1st among Chinese mainland scholars and 41st in the world.
In addition to Dr. Zhang Hongjiang, there are two Chinese selected in the list of academicians, namely Professor Fang Daining, director of the Institute of Advanced Structural Technology of Beijing Institute of Technology, and Professor Cai Kequan, Department of Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University.
In the last list of selected academicians, there was Yang Likun, one of the three giants of deep learning and the winner of the Turing Award, and 7 Chinese scholars were shortlisted, including Dr. Chen Lieping, who has made outstanding contributions to the research of immune checkpoint proteins, and Dr. Liu Ruqian, a pioneer in the field of single-base editing.
Sources of material for this article: Per app, Financial Associated Press, The Paper, Heart of the Machine, the website of the National Academy of Engineering and public information
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