Yaron A. Felus

• Comment: The page as of August 24th has too many issues for an article on Wikipedia. These need to be repaired, then the tricky issue of whether he passes notability can be addressed. Ldm1954 (talk) 21:25, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

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Yaron A. Felus
Yaron_Felus.jpg Yaron_Felus.jpg
Born	(1968-06-26) June 26, 1968 Holon, Israel
🎓 Alma mater	Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (B.Sc.) ITC, University of Twente (M.Sc.) Ohio State University (Ph.D.)
💼 Occupation
🏅 Awards	Outstanding Lecturer Award, Technion (2014)

Yaron A. Felus (born June 26, 1968) is the national statistician of Israel and head of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) since April 2023. He is a data scientist and geodesist, and previously served as chief scientist of the Survey of Israel (2012–2021). He is also an associate professor at Ariel University, where he established the surveying and geoinformatics track.

Biography

Felus was born in Holon. He graduated with distinction in electrical and computer engineering from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev through the Israel Defense Forces academic reserve program, and served as a technical officer in the C4I and Cyber Defense Directorate.

He completed a master's degree in geoinformatics at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (Netherlands) and qualified as a licensed surveyor at the Technion. In 1998 he began doctoral studies at Ohio State University, where he worked at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center on the TAMARA project of the National Science Foundation, building a geospatial database of West Antarctica and participating in a field expedition to the South Pole. He received his Ph.D. in 2001 with a dissertation titled "New Methods for Spatial Statistics in Geographic Information Systems".

After his doctorate he taught at Ferris State University and consulted for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and NASA. He returned to Israel in 2008 to join the Survey of Israel, and from 2010 to 2020 also served as a senior adjunct faculty member at the Technion, receiving its Outstanding Lecturer Award in 2014. He completed leadership programs at Harvard University in 2015 and 2017 through the Wexner Foundation.

National Statistician

Felus was appointed National Statistician and head of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics in April 2023, selected unanimously from among 13 candidates by a search committee of the Prime Minister's Office.

Under his leadership the CBS launched an interactive public dashboard for the 2022 Population and Housing Census, built on Israel's government cloud infrastructure (Nimbus) in collaboration with Google Cloud and deployed jointly with the Survey of Israel. The platform makes census data accessible at the neighborhood level through both the CBS website and the national Govmap portal, allowing comparisons across geographic units and years back to the 1972 census.

Chief Scientist at the Survey of Israel

From 2012 to 2021 Felus served as Chief Scientist and head of the Research and Development Division of the Survey of Israel. He oversaw the organization's digital transformation into a fully online agency, including the development of the Govmap national geospatial portal (over 350 data layers, approximately one million citizen visits per month) and the TopoCad system, which unified the Survey's databases into a single online platform. He also coordinated the national real-estate database reform under Government Decision 374 of June 2013, advanced the Survey Regulations (Surveying and Mapping) of 2016, and led standardization work for national geospatial data collection.

Research

Felus's research spans total least squares methods for geospatial adjustment and spatial interpolation. Working with Burkhard Schaffrin of Ohio State University, he applied total least squares (TLS) to errors-in-variables (EIV) models in geomatics, accounting for measurement errors in all variables simultaneously rather than only in the observation vector. Their joint work addresses coordinate transformation, cadastral map enhancement, and geodetic adjustment, and their 2008 paper in the Journal of Geodesy has become a standard reference in the geodetic literature. He also developed a Delaunay triangulation-structured Kriging method for spatial interpolation in geographic information systems.

Selected publications

• Felus, Y. A. (2004). "Application of Total Least Squares for Spatial Point Process Analysis". Journal of Surveying Engineering. 130 (3): 126–133. doi:10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9453(2004)130:3(126).
• Felus, Y. A. (2006). "On Linear Transformations of Spatial Data Using the Structured Total Least Norm Principle". Cartography and Geographic Information Science. 33 (3): 195–205. doi:10.1559/152304006779077273.
• Felus, Y. A. (2007). "On the Positional Enhancement of Digital Cadastral Maps". Survey Review. 39 (306): 268–281. doi:10.1179/175227007X197183.
• Schaffrin, B.; Felus, Y. A. (2008). "On the Multivariate Total Least-Squares Approach to Empirical Coordinate Transformations: Three Algorithms". Journal of Geodesy. 82 (6): 373–383. doi:10.1007/s00190-007-0186-5.
• Schaffrin, B.; Felus, Y. A. (2009). "An Algorithmic Approach to the Total Least-Squares Problem with Linear and Quadratic Constraints". Studia Geophysica et Geodaetica. 53 (1): 1–16. doi:10.1007/s11200-009-0001-2.
• Felus, Y. A.; Burtch, R. C. (2009). "On Symmetrical Three-Dimensional Datum Conversion". GPS Solutions. 13 (1): 65–74. doi:10.1007/s10291-008-0100-5.

• Felus, Y. A.; Saalfeld, A.; Schaffrin, B. (2005). "Delaunay Triangulation Structured Kriging for Surface Interpolation". Surveying and Land Information Science. 65 (1): 27–36.
• Schaffrin, B.; Bae, T.-S.; Felus, Y. (2018). "Optimal Biased Kriging: Homeogram Tapering and Applications to Geoid Undulations in Korea". Journal of Geodetic Science. 8: 154–161. doi:10.1515/jogs-2018-2016.

External links

• Lecture by Yaron Felus on new guidelines for information management in surveying at the Survey of Israel, April 6, 2021

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