Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Computer Science,

#151

Sarit Kraus

#19519

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Sarit Kraus is a professor of computer science at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She was named the 2020-2021 ACM Athena Lecturer recognising her contributions to artificial intelligence, notably to multiagent systems, human-agent interaction, autonomous agents and nonmonotonic reasoning, in addition to exemplary service and leadership in these fields.

#152

Thelma Estrin

#14886

Overall Influence

1924 - 2014 (90 years)

Thelma Estrin was an American computer scientist and engineer who did pioneering work in the fields of expert systems and biomedical engineering. Estrin was one of the first to apply computer technology to healthcare and medical research. In 1954, Estrin helped to design the Weizmann Automatic Computer, or WEIZAC, the first computer in Israel and the Middle East, a moment marked as an IEEE Milestone in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She was professor emerita in the Department of Computer Science, University of California at Los Angeles .

#153

Ayanna Howard

#21447

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Ayanna MacCalla Howard is an American roboticist, entrepreneur and educator currently serving as the dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University. Assuming the post in March 2021, Howard became the first woman to lead the Ohio State College of Engineering.

#154

Cynthia Rudin

#21704

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Cynthia Diane Rudin is an American computer scientist and statistician specializing in machine learning and known for her work in interpretable machine learning. She is the director of the Interpretable Machine Learning Lab at Duke University, where she is a professor of computer science, electrical and computer engineering, statistical science, and biostatistics and bioinformatics. In 2022, she won the Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for her work on the importance of transparency f...

#155

Lixia Zhang

#24742

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Lixia Zhang is the Jonathan B. Postel Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her expertise is in computer networks; she helped found the Internet Engineering Task Force, designed the Resource Reservation Protocol, coined the term "middlebox", and pioneered the development of named data networking.

#156

Carol Spradling

#32037

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Carol Spradling is an American professor, computer scientist who served as the first Director of the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. She is known for her work with computer ethics, profession-based education, interactive media, and expanding the involvement of underrepresented groups and women in computing. Dr. Spradling taught computer science courses and served as a provost fellow and a liaison to the Northland Center For Advanced Professional Studies program. Spradling served on the Missouri Department of High...

#157

Margaret H. Wright

#13986

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Margaret H. Wright is an American computer scientist and mathematician. She is a Silver Professor of Computer Science and former Chair of the Computer Science department at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, with research interests in optimization, linear algebra, and scientific computing. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for development of numerical optimization algorithms and for leadership in the applied mathematics community. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. She was the first woman to serve as Presiden...

#158

Telle Whitney

#24128

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Telle Whitney is the former CEO and President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. A computer scientist by training, she cofounded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing with Anita Borg in 1994 and joined the Anita Borg Institute in 2002.

#159

Anita K. Jones

#15292

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Anita Katherine Jones is an American computer scientist and former U.S. government official. She was Director, Defense Research and Engineering from 1993 to 1997. Jones was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the theory and implementation of software systems and for extensive public service.

#160

Yasmin Kafai

#20015

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Yasmin B. Kafai is a German American academic who is Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, with a secondary appointment in Computer and Information Sciences at University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science. She is a past president of the International Society of the Learning Sciences , and an executive editor of the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

#161

Lorinda Cherry

#26718

Overall Influence

1944 - 2022 (78 years)

Lorinda Cherry was an American computer scientist and programmer. Much of her career was spent at Bell Labs, where she was for many years a member of the original Unix Lab. Cherry developed several mathematical tools and utilities for text formatting and analysis, and influenced the creation of others.

#162

Marie desJardins

#33557

Overall Influence

Marie desJardins is an American computer scientist, known for her research on artificial intelligence and computer science education. She is also active in broadening participation in computing. Biography DesJardins grew up in Columbia, Maryland. She received an A. B. in Engineering and Computer Science from Harvard University in 1985. She received a Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Berkeley in 1992.

#163

Dana Randall

#18035

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Dana Randall is an American computer scientist. She works as the ADVANCE Professor of Computing, and adjunct professor of mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also an External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Previously she was executive director of the Georgia Tech Institute of Data Engineering and Science that she co-founded, and director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center. Her research include combinatorics, computational aspects of statistical mechanics, Monte Carlo stimulation of Markov chains, and randomized algorithms.

#164

Joanna Bryson

#25197

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Joanna Joy Bryson is professor at Hertie School in Berlin. She works on Artificial Intelligence, ethics and collaborative cognition. She has been a British citizen since 2007. Education Bryson attended Glenbard North High School and graduated in 1982. She studied Behavioural Science at the University of Chicago, graduating with an AB in 1986. In 1991 she moved to the University of Edinburgh where she completed an MSc in Artificial Intelligence before an MPhil in Psychology. Bryson moved to MIT to complete her PhD, earning a doctorate under Lynn Andrea Stein in 2001 for her thesis "Intelligence by Design: Principles of Modularity and Coordination for Engineering Complex Adaptive Agents".

#165

Mira Mezini

#36647

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Mira Mezini is a German computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. She heads the software engineering group.

#166

Anna Patterson

#28845

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Anna Patterson is a software engineer and a contributor to search engines. Education Patterson received her B.S. in Computer Science and another in Electrical Engineering from McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and was a Research Scientist at Stanford University in artificial intelligence working with John McCarthy on Phenomenal Data Mining and Carolyn Talcott on theorem provers.

#167

Jessica McKellar

Jessica McKellar

#29059

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (37 years)

Jessica Tess McKellar is an American software developer, engineering manager, and author. Education McKellar attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied computer science and chemistry.

#168

Jeanne Ferrante

#29828

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Jeanne Ferrante is an American computer scientist active in the field of compiler technology. As a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering, Ferrante has made important contributions regarding optimization and parallelization.

#169

Kanwal Ameen

#13626

Overall Influence

Kanwal Ameen is a Pakistani professor in information management. She has served as chairperson of the Department of Information Management , formerly the Department of Library and Information Science, and as director, directorate of external linkages. On 31 May 2019, Ameen was appointed to a four-year term as vice-chancellor of the University of Home Economics.

#170

Barbara Simons

#21313

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Barbara Bluestein Simons is an American computer scientist and the former president of the Association for Computing Machinery . She is a Ph.D. graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and spent her early career working as an IBM researcher. She is the founder and former co-chair of USACM, the ACM U.S. Public Policy Council. Her main areas of research are compiler optimization, scheduling theory and algorithm analysis and design.

#171

Helen Chan Wolf

Helen Chan Wolf

#30995

Overall Influence

Helen Chan Wolf is an artificial intelligence pioneer who worked on facial recognition technology and Shakey the robot, the world's first autonomous robot, at SRI International. Career In the early 1960s, Wolf worked with Charles Bisson and Woody Bledsoe at Panoramic Research to train computers in recognising human faces . Early computer programs used humans to coordinate a set of features from images of faces and then a computer for the recognition. These features included things such as the positions the inside and outside corners of eyes and mouth. Operators such as these could process arou...

#172

Mirella Lapata

#37613

Overall Influence

Mirella Lapata FRSE is a computer scientist and Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Working on the general problem of extracting semantic information from large bodies of text, Lapata develops computer algorithms and models in the field of natural language processing .

#173

Francesca Rossi

Francesca Rossi

#35299

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Francesca Rossi is an Italian computer scientist, currently working at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as an IBM Fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader. Education and career She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from the University of Pisa in 1986, and a PhD in computer science from the same university in 1993. After her graduation, she stayed at the University of Pisa as an assistant professor until 1998. She then moved to the University of Padova where she was an associate professor until 2001, and a full professor until 2018. In 2014–2015 she was on sabbatical as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University.

#174

Radhia Cousot

#33756

Overall Influence

1947 - 2014 (67 years)

Radhia Cousot was a French computer scientist known for inventing abstract interpretation. Studies Radhia Cousot was born on 6 August 1947, in Sakiet Sidi Youssef in Tunisia, where she survived the massacre of the children in her school on February 8, 1958. She then went to the Lycée de jeunes filles at Sousse, the Lycée français at Algiers and then the Polytechnic School of Algiers . She specialized in mathematical optimization and integer linear programming. Supported by a UNESCO fellowship , she obtained a master's degree in Computer Science at the Joseph Fourier University of Grenoble in 1972.

#175

Jeanne W. Ross

#24361

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Jeanne Wenzel Ross is an American organizational theorist and principal research scientist at MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Center for Information Systems Research , specializes in Enterprise Architecture, ICT and Management. She is known for her work on IT governance, and Enterprise architecture.

#176

Suchi Saria

#33114

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Suchi Saria is an Associate Professor of Machine Learning and Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University, where she uses big data to improve patient outcomes. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. From 2022 to 2023, she was an investment partner at AIX Ventures. AIX Ventures is a venture capital fund that invests in artificial intelligence startups.

#177

Elisa Bertino

#38059

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Elisa Bertino is a professor of computer science at Purdue University and is acting as the research director of CERIAS, the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, an institute attached to Purdue University. Bertino's research interest include data privacy and computer security.

#178

Kathryn S. McKinley

Kathryn S. McKinley

#36912

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Kathryn S. McKinley is an American computer scientist noted for her research on compilers, runtime systems, and computer architecture. She is also known for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. McKinley was co-chair of CRA-W from 2011 to 2014.

#179

Barbara E. Moo

#43321

Overall Influence

Barbara E. Moo is an American computer scientist known for co-authoring several books on C++, working on an early product written in C++, and directing AT&T's WorldNet AT&T's Internet services business.

#180

Janelle Shane

#41398

Overall Influence

Janelle Shane is an optics research scientist and artificial intelligence researcher, writer and public speaker. She keeps a popular science blog called AI Weirdness, where she documents various machine learning algorithms, both ones submitted by readers and ones she personally creates. Shane's first book You Look Like A Thing And I Love You: How AI Works And Why It's Making The World A Weirder Place was published in November 2019 covering many of the topics from her AI Weirdness blog for a general audience.

#181

Ming C. Lin

#31718

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Ming C. Lin is an American computer scientist and a former chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she also holds an endowed faculty position as the Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science. Prior to moving to Maryland in 2018, Lin was the John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

#182

Rada Mihalcea

#41333

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Rada Mihalcea is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on natural language processing, multimodal processing, and computational social science.

#183

Emma Hart

#41528

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Professor Emma Hart, FRSE is an English computer scientist known for her work in artificial immune systems , evolutionary computation and optimisation. She is a professor of computational intelligence at Edinburgh Napier University, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Evolutionary Computation , and D. Coordinator of the Future & Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative, Fundamentals of Collective Adaptive Systems.

#184

Mary Jean Harrold

#33968

Overall Influence

1947 - 2013 (66 years)

Mary Jean Harrold was an American computer scientist noted for her research on software engineering. She was also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. She was on the boards of both CRA and CRA-W and was Co-Chair of CRA-W from 2003 to 2006.

#185

Janice Long

#8344

Overall Influence

1955 - 2021 (66 years)

Janice Berry , known professionally by her first married name Janice Long, was an English broadcaster who was best known for her work in British music radio. In a career that spanned five decades, she became the first woman to have her own daily music show on BBC Radio 1. She also appeared on other BBC Radio stations, such as BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio London, BBC Radio WM, and BBC Radio 6 Music, and was a regular presenter on the television chart show Top of the Pops.

#186

Ellen Hildreth

#21596

Overall Influence

Ellen Catherine Hildreth is a professor of computer science at Wellesley College. Her fields are visual perception and computer vision. She co-invented the Marr-Hildreth algorithm along with David Marr.

#187

Dana Ulery

#19789

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Dana Ulery is an American computer scientist and pioneer in scientific computing applications. Career Ulery received her BA from Grinnell College in 1959, with a double major in English Literature and Mathematics. She earned her MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Delaware, in 1972 and 1975 respectively.

#188

Ilkay Altintas

#16827

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Ilkay Altintas is a Turkish-American data and computer scientist, and researcher in the domain of supercomputing and high-performance computing applications. Since 2015, Altintas has served as chief data science officer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center , at the University of California, San Diego , where she has also served as founder and director of the Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence since 2014, as well as founder and director of the WIFIRE lab. Altintas is also the co-initiator of the Kepler scientific workflow system, an open-source platform that endows research scien...

#189

Liuba Shrira

#46014

Overall Influence

Liuba Shrira is a professor of computer science at Brandeis University, whose research interests primarily involve distributed systems. Liuba Shrira received her PhD from Technion. She is affiliated with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Previously, she was a researcher in the MIT Programming Methodology Group , a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research , and a visiting professor at Technion .

#190

Joan Feigenbaum

#24189

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Joan Feigenbaum is a theoretical computer scientist with a background in mathematics. She is the Grace Murray Hopper Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. At Yale she also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Economics. Feigenbaum co-invented the computer-security research area of trust management.

#191

Kim Binsted

#31305

Overall Influence

Kim Binsted is a professor in the Information and Computer Sciences Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Binsted's work explores artificial intelligence, human-computer interfaces, and long-duration human space exploration.

#192

Paula Hawthorn

#33671

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Paula Birdwell Hawthorn is an American computer scientist. She is recognised as an expert and pioneer in database systems. She has also founded organisations for women in computer science and created affirmative action programs to support students in the field.

#193

Gabriele Kotsis

Gabriele Kotsis

#37558

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Gabriele Kotsis is an Austrian computer scientist. She is full professor in computer science at Johannes Kepler University , Linz, Austria, while leading the Department of Telecommunication and the division of Cooperative Information Systems. She was vice-rector for Research and the Advancement of Women, and longstanding chairwoman of Universities Austria's Policy Committee on Research. She is a distinguished member and elected president of the Association for Computing Machinery .

#194

Cassie Kozyrkov

Cassie Kozyrkov

#14335

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Cassie Kozyrkov is a South African data scientist and statistician. She worked at Google in Developer Relations team and with Decision Intelligence at Google. Early life and education Kozyrkov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and grew up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. As a child, Kozyrkov became interested in data when she discovered spreadsheet software and later became interested in the relationship between information and decision-making. She began her studies in economics and mathematical statistics at Nelson Mandela University at the age of fifteen, and transferred to the University of Chicago to complete her undergraduate degree.

#195

Mary K. Vernon

#35643

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Mary Katherine Vernon is an American computer scientist who works as a professor of computer science and industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research concerns high-performance computer architecture and streaming media.

#196

Carolina Cruz-Neira

Carolina Cruz-Neira

#28105

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Carolina Cruz-Neira is a Spanish-Venezuelan-American computer engineer, researcher, designer, educator, and a pioneer of virtual reality . She is known for inventing the cave automatic virtual environment . She previously worked at Iowa State University , University of Louisiana at Lafayette , University of Arkansas at Little Rock , and she is currently an Agere Chair Professor at University of Central Florida .

#197

Margaret Martonosi

#40677

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Margaret Martonosi is an American computer scientist who is currently the Hugh Trumbull Adams '35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. Martonosi is noted for her research in computer architecture and mobile computing with a particular focus on power-efficiency.

#198

Maria Zemankova

Maria Zemankova

#27482

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Maria Zemankova is a Computer Scientist who is known for the theory and implementation of the first Fuzzy Relational Database System. This research has become important for the handling of approximate queries in databases. She retired from the Intelligent Information Systems Division at the National Science Foundation in July 2020. She is the first recipient of the SIGMOD Contributions Award for her work in the conception of initiatives in research on scientific databases and digital libraries. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1983 from Florida State University for her work on F...

#199

Iryna Gurevych

#40783

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Iryna Gurevych is a German computer scientist. She is Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University of Darmstadt and Director of Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab. Life Gurevych received her diploma in English and German Linguistics from the Vinnytsia State Pedagogical University in 1998. In 2001, she received her Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from University of Duisburg-Essen.

#200

Milly Koss

#39005

Overall Influence

1928 - 2012 (84 years)

Adele Mildred Koss, known as Milly Koss, was an American pioneering computer programmer. The Association for Women in Computing awarded her an Ada Lovelace Award in 2000. She attended Philadelphia High School for Girls and graduated in Mathematics from University of Pennsylvania in 1950. Following her first job interview with an insurance company, Koss, who was engaged at the time, was rejected for the reason that married women would have children and leave.

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