We warmly congratulate Dr. Ivica Obadic on the successful defense of his PhD dissertation, “Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Earth Observation”, at Technical University of Munich, within the TUM School of Engineering and Design and the Munich Center for Machine Learning.
Dr. Obadic’s doctoral research addressed a fundamental question in modern AI for Earth Observation: not only how well models perform, but whether their decisions can be understood, trusted, and meaningfully interpreted in real-world applications. Throughout his PhD, he advanced the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence by combining strong methodological contributions with a clear focus on interpretability, human-centered design, and societal relevance.
Key contributions of his dissertation include:
• A systematic and forward-looking review of explainable AI methods in Earth Observation, clarifying current trends, challenges, and open research directions at the intersection of AI and geosciences.
• Human-centered visual concept explanations that enable intuitive interpretation of socioeconomic patterns from satellite imagery.
• Inherently interpretable Vision Graph Neural Networks, allowing the analysis of critical spatial interactions rather than treating complex models as black boxes.
• MedSat, a novel dataset linking satellite imagery with medical prescription data, opening new avenues for studying environmental impacts on public health.
• An evaluation framework for attention-based explanations, critically assessing whether attention mechanisms capture meaningful temporal and phenological patterns in crop classification.
The dissertation stands out for its strong commitment to trustworthy and interpretable AI, demonstrating that explainability is not a limitation on model performance, but a catalyst for scientific insight and real-world impact in high-stakes domains such as climate science, urban analysis, agriculture, and public health.
The examination committee consisted of Prof. Caroline Gevaert (University of Twente), Prof. Plamen Angelov (Lancaster University), and Prof. Muhammad Shahzad (now with the University of Reading). We sincerely thank the committee for their time, expertise, and valuable feedback.
We congratulate Dr. Obadic on this important milestone and wish him every success in his future research career.