Stian Normann Anfinsen is a Research Professor with the Earth Observation Group at NORCE Research AS in Tromsø, Norway. His research interests are in machine learning, deep neural networks and statistical data analysis applied to satellite remote sensing, earth observation and geoscience. He combines domain knowledge about sensor physics and data processing with methodological expertise to invent new algorithms for information extraction from satellite data.
Stian received the cand.mag. (B.Sc.), cand.scient (M.Sc.). and Ph.D. degrees in physics from UiT The Arctic University of Norway in 1997, 2000 and 2010, respectively. He received an M.Sc. in Communications, Control and Digital Signal Processing from the University of Strathclyde i Glasgow, UK, in 1998.
He became an associate professor in the Earth Observation Group at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in 2014, served as Head of the Department at the Department of Physics and Technology in 2016/17, and was one of the founders of the Machine Learning Group in 2017, where he became a full professor in 2022. In 2021 he resigned as leader of the UiT Machine Learning Group in 2021. Since then his main affiliation has been with NORCE.
