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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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#1201

Neal Koblitz

#4790

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Neal I. Koblitz is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. He is also an adjunct professor with the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research at the University of Waterloo. He is the creator of hyperelliptic curve cryptography and the independent co-creator of elliptic curve cryptography.

#1202

Richard Jozsa

#6039

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Richard Jozsa is an Australian mathematician who holds the Leigh Trapnell Chair in Quantum Physics at the University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where his research investigates quantum information science. A pioneer of his field, he is the co-author of the Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm and one of the co-inventors of quantum teleportation.

#1203

Thomas G. Dietterich

#29280

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Thomas G. Dietterich is emeritus professor of computer science at Oregon State University. He is one of the pioneers of the field of machine learning. He served as executive editor of Machine Learning and helped co-found the Journal of Machine Learning Research. In response to the media's attention on the dangers of artificial intelligence, Dietterich has been quoted for an academic perspective to a broad range of media outlets including National Public Radio, Business Insider, Microsoft Research, CNET, and The Wall Street Journal.

#1204

Margaret Mitchell

#21315

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Margaret Mitchell is a computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and fairness in machine learning. She is most well known for her work on automatically removing undesired biases concerning demographic groups from machine learning models, as well as more transparent reporting of their intended use.

#1205

Dana Moshkovitz

#18702

Overall Influence

Dana Moshkovitz Aaronson is an Israeli theoretical computer scientist whose research topics include approximation algorithms and probabilistically checkable proofs. She is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin.

#1206

Steve Whittaker

#23903

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Steve Whittaker is a Professor in human-computer interaction at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is best known for his research at the intersection of computer science and social science in particular on computer mediated communication and personal information management. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery , and winner of the CSCW 2018 "Lasting Impact" award. He also received a Lifetime Research Achievement Award from SIGCHI, is a Member of the SIGCHI Academy. He is Editor of the journal Human-Computer Interaction.

#1207

Jennifer Seberry

#25570

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Jennifer Roma Seberry is an Australian cryptographer, mathematician, and computer scientist, currently a professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She was formerly the head of the Department of Computer Science and director of the Centre for Computer Security Research at the university.

#1208

Eric Brewer

#26278

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Eric Allen Brewer is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and vice-president of infrastructure at Google. His research interests include operating systems and distributed computing. He is known for formulating the CAP theorem about distributed network applications in the late 1990s.

#1209

Kurt Bollacker

#23396

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Kurt Bollacker is an American computer scientist with a research background in the areas of machine learning, digital libraries, semantic networks, and electro-cardiographic modeling. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. Bollacker spent time as a biomedical research engineer at the Duke University Medical Center where worked on electro-cardiography. He is co-creator of the CiteSeer research tool which was produced while he was a visiting researcher at the NEC Research Institute.

#1210

Tsutomu Shimomura

#10603

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Tsutomu Shimomura is a Japanese-born physicist and computer security expert. He is known for helping the FBI track and arrest hacker Kevin Mitnick. Takedown, his 1996 book on the subject with journalist John Markoff, was later adapted for the screen in Track Down in 2000.

#1211

Theo Härder

#21204

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Theo Härder is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kaiserslautern. Life and career Theo Härder studied electrical Engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Technische Universität Darmstadt, earning his doctorate there in 1975. In 1976 he moved to the IBM Research - Almaden in San Jose, California. In 1977 he returned to TU Darmstadt as a professor at the Department of Computer Science. In 1980 he accepted an appointment at the University of Kaiserslautern in computer science.

#1212

Norbert Pohlmann

Norbert Pohlmann

#18963

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Norbert Pohlmann is a computer scientist and a professor at the . He is also chairman of the board of the IT security association TeleTrusT. Career Born in Ratingen, Pohlmann studied electrical engineering from 1981 to 1985, specialising in computer science. He wrote his doctoral thesis on "Possibilities and Limitations of Firewall Systems".

#1213

Damien Doligez

#20069

Overall Influence

Damien Doligez is a French academic and programmer. He is best known for his role as a developer of the OCaml system, especially its garbage collector. He is a research scientist at the French government research institution INRIA.

#1214

Cliff Joslyn

#9197

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Cliff Joslyn is an American mathematician, cognitive scientist, and cybernetician. He is currently the Chief Knowledge Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Seattle, Washington, US, and visiting professor of Systems Science at Binghamton University .

#1215

Uriel Feige

#14725

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Uriel Feige is an Israeli computer scientist who was a doctoral student of Adi Shamir. Life Uriel Feige currently holds the post of Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot in Israel.

#1216

Hany Farid

#7826

Overall Influence

Hany Farid is an American university professor who specializes in the analysis of digital images and the detection of digitally manipulated images such as deepfakes. Farid served as Dean and Head of School for the UC Berkeley School of Information. In addition to teaching, writing, and conducting research, Farid acts as a consultant for non-profits, government agencies, and news organizations. He is the author of the book Photo Forensics .

#1217

Ming Li

#20425

Overall Influence

Ming Li is a Canadian computer scientist, known for his fundamental contributions to Kolmogorov complexity, bioinformatics, machine learning theory, and analysis of algorithms. Li is currently a University Professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He holds a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics. In addition to academic achievements, his research has led to the founding of two independent companies.

#1218

Lise Getoor

#26488

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Lise Getoor is a professor in the computer science department, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her primary research interests are in machine learning and reasoning with uncertainty, applied to graphs and structured data. She also works in data integration, social network analysis and visual analytics. She has edited a book on Statistical relational learning that is a main reference in this domain. She has published many highly cited papers in academic journals and conference proceedings.

#1219

William Clinger

#22617

Overall Influence

William D. Clinger is an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He is known for his work on higher-order and functional programming languages, and for extensive contributions in helping create and implement international technical standards for the programming language Scheme via the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and American National Standards Institute . Clinger was an editor of the second through fifth Revised Reports on Scheme , and an invited speaker on Scheme at the Lisp50 conference celebrating the 50th birthday of the language Lisp.

#1220

Farinaz Koushanfar

#12516

Overall Influence

Farinaz Koushanfar is an Iranian-American computer scientist whose research concerns embedded systems, ad-hoc networks, and computer security. She is a professor and Henry Booker Faculty Scholar of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

#1221

Jean-Claude Latombe

#12714

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jean-Claude Latombe is a French-American roboticist and the Kumagai Professor Emeritus in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. Latombe is a researcher in robot motion planning, and has authored one of the most highly cited books in the field.

#1222

Stephen Wolff

#8030

Overall Influence

Stephen South Wolff is one of the many fathers of the Internet. He is mainly credited with turning the Internet from a government project into something that proved to have scholarly and commercial interest for the rest of the world. Dr. Wolff realized before most the potential in the Internet and began selling the idea that the Internet could have a profound effect on both the commercial and academic world.

#1223

Len Bass

#24729

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Leonard Joel Bass is an American software engineer, Emeritus professor and former researcher at the Software Engineering Institute , particularly known for his contributions on software architecture in practice.

#1224

Geoffrey C. Fox

Geoffrey C. Fox

#13974

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Geoffrey Charles Fox is a British-born American theoretical physicist and computer scientist, and professor of informatics and computing, and physics at Indiana University. Fox was educated at the Leys School and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1964, he was the senior wrangler at Cambridge, the best performer in the mathematics tripos. In the same year, he also played in the annual chess match against Oxford University.

#1225

Daniel Bleichenbacher

#21494

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Daniel Bleichenbacher is a Swiss cryptographer, previously a researcher at Bell Labs, and currently employed at Google. He received his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich in 1996 for contributions to computational number theory, particularly concerning message verification in the ElGamal and RSA public-key cryptosystems. His doctoral advisor was Ueli Maurer.

#1226

John Platt

#25561

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

John Carlton Platt is an American computer scientist. He is currently a distinguished scientist at Google. Formerly he was a deputy managing director at Microsoft Research Redmond Labs. Platt worked for Microsoft from 1997 to 2015. Before that, he served as director of research at Synaptics.

#1227

Garth Gibson

#21458

Overall Influence

Garth Alan Gibson is a computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon University. Gibson's developed the RAID taxonomy of redundant data storage systems, along with David A. Patterson and Randy Katz. Born in Aurora, Ontario, he holds a Ph.D. and an MSc in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.Math in computer science from the University of Waterloo. He was involved in informed prefetch computing and network-attached secure disks, a precursor to the SCSI object storage device command set. Gibson was the initial director of the Parallel Data Laboratory at Carnegie Mello...

#1228

William Crowther

William Crowther

#18602

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

William Crowther is an American computer programmer, caver, and rock climber. He is the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure from 1975 onward, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of video game design and inspired the text adventure game genre.

#1229

Alex Pentland

#33397

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Alex Paul "Sandy" Pentland is an American computer scientist, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, and serial entrepreneur. Education Pentland received his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan and obtained his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982.

#1230

Andrew Witkin

#18878

Overall Influence

1952 - 2010 (58 years)

Andrew Paul Witkin was an American computer scientist who made major contributions in computer vision and computer graphics. Education Witkin studied psychology at Columbia College, Columbia University, for his bachelor's degree, and at MIT for his Ph.D supervised by Whitman A. Richards.

#1231

Vahid Tarokh

#10798

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Vahid Tarokh is an Iranian–American electrical engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, and professor. Since 2018, he has served as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a Professor of Mathematics, and the Rhodes Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. From 2019 to 2021, he was a Microsoft Data Science Investigator at Microsoft Innovation Hub at Duke University. Tarokh works with complex datasets and uses machine learning algorithms to predict catastrophic events.

#1232

Dacheng Tao

#31400

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Dacheng Tao is an engineer from the University of Sydney, Australia. He received a PhD in 2007 from the University of London under Stephen Maybank, with a thesis titled Discriminative linear and multilinear subspace methods. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for his contributions to pattern recognition and visual analytics. He was awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2017. In 2018, Tao was also elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science for his "ground-breaking contributions in artificial intelligence, computer vision image processing and machine learning.

#1233

Ellen Spertus

#14552

Overall Influence

Ellen R. Spertus is an American computer scientist who is currently the Elinor Kilgore Snyder Professor of computer science at Mills College, Oakland, California, and a former senior research scientist at Google.

#1234

Holger H. Hoos

#30090

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Holger H. Hoos is a German-Canadian computer scientist and a Alexander von Humboldt-professor of artificial intelligence at RWTH Aachen University. He also holds a part-time appointment as a professor of machine learning at Leiden University, and he is an adjunct professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia, where he held a full-time professorial appointment from 2000 until 2016. His research interests are focused on artificial intelligence, at the intersection of machine learning, automated reasoning and optimization, with applications in empirical algorithmics, bioinformatics and operations research.

#1235

Scott Kirkpatrick

#14884

Overall Influence

Scott Kirkpatrick is a computer scientist, and professor in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He has over 75,000 citations in the fields of: information appliances design, statistical physics, and distributed computing.

#1236

Nikolay Brusentsov

Nikolay Brusentsov

#10832

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

Nikolay Petrovich Brusentsov was a computer scientist, most famous for having built a ternary computer, Setun, together with Sergei Sobolev in 1958. In 1970 he designed Setun 70, implementing principles which were later proposed for the RISC architecture independently. He died on 4 December 2014.

#1237

Luc J. Van Gool

#34803

Overall Influence

#1238

Christoph Meinel

Christoph Meinel

#19338

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Christoph Meinel is a German computer scientist and professor of Internet technologies and systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute of the University of Potsdam. In the years 2004 to 2023 he was the scientific director and CEO of the HPI and has developed the openHPI learning platform with more than 1 million enrolled learners. In 2019, he was appointed to the New Internet IPv6 Hall of Fame.

#1239

Bart Preneel

#18966

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Bart Preneel is a Belgian cryptographer and cryptanalyst. He is a professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in the COSIC group. He was the president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research in 2008-2013 and project manager of ECRYPT.

#1240

Anind Dey

#26863

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Anind Dey is a computer scientist. He is the Dean of the University of Washington Information School. Dey is formerly the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie at the intersection of human–computer interaction and ubiquitous computing, focusing on how to make novel technologies more usable and useful. In particular, he builds tools that make it easier to build useful ubiquitous computing applications and supporting end users in controlling their ubiquitous computing systems.

#1241

Thomas Henzinger

#17639

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Thomas Henzinger is an Austrian computer scientist, researcher, and former president of the Institute of Science and Technology, Austria. Early life and education Henzinger was born in Austria. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from Johannes Kepler University Linz, and his PhD from Stanford University in 1991, advised by Zohar Manna. He is married to Monika Henzinger and has three children.

#1242

Tomoyuki Nishita

#24096

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Tomoyuki Nishita is a professor at the University of Tokyo. Dr. Nishita received a research award for computer graphics from the Information Processing Society of Japan in 1987, and also received the Steven Anson Coons Award from the ACM SIGGRAPH in 2005.

#1243

Harry Bouwman

#19174

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Willem Adriaan Gerrit Anton Bouwman is a Dutch Information systems researcher, and professor at the Åbo Akademi University, Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research, known for his work on mobile services, business models and business architecture.

#1244

Victor Shoup

#17991

Overall Influence

Victor Shoup is a computer scientist and mathematician. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1989, and he did his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He is a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, focusing on algorithm and cryptography courses. He is currently a Principal Research Scientist at DFINITY and has held positions at AT&T Bell Labs, the University of Toronto, Saarland University, and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory.

#1245

Robert Haralick

#21311

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Robert M. Haralick is Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at Graduate Center of the City University of New York . Haralick is one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition, and image analysis. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Fellow and past president of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. Professor Haralick is the King-Sun Fu Prize winner of 2016, "for contributions in image analysis, including remote sensing, texture analysis, mathematical morphology, consistent labeling, and system performance ev...

#1246

Ton Roosendaal

#10900

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Ton Roosendaal is a Dutch software developer and film producer. He is the original creator of the open-source 3D creation suite Blender and Traces . He is also known as the founder and chairman of the Blender Foundation, and for pioneering large scale open-content projects. In 2007, he established the Blender Institute in Amsterdam, where he works on coordinating Blender development, publishing manuals and DVD training, and organizing 3D animation and game projects.

#1247

Lea Verou

#21880

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (38 years)

Lea Verou is a computer scientist, front end web developer, speaker and author, originally from Lesbos, Greece. Verou is currently a research assistant at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , an elected participant in the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Architecture Group , and an Invited Expert in the W3C CSS Working Group. She is the author of CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems .

#1248

Frank McSherry

#20703

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Frank McSherry is a computer scientist. McSherry's areas of research include distributed computing and information privacy. McSherry is known, along with Cynthia Dwork, Adam D. Smith, and Kobbi Nissim, as one of the co-inventors of differential privacy, for which he won the 2017 Gödel Prize. Along with Kunal Talwar, he is the co-creator of the exponential mechanism for differential privacy, for which they won the 2009 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

#1249

Nikolai Bezroukov

#19578

Overall Influence

Nikolai Bezroukov is a Senior Internet Security Analyst at BASF Corporation and was member of Computer Science at Fairleigh Dickinson University . Also Webmaster of Open Source Software University, a volunteer technical site for the United Nations Sustainable Development Networking Programme that helps with Internet connectivity and distributes Linux to developing countries.

#1250

Jean-Paul Delahaye

Jean-Paul Delahaye

#19017

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jean-Paul Delahaye is a French computer scientist and mathematician. Career Delahaye has been a professor of computer science at the Lille University of Science and Technology since 1988 and a researcher in the school's computer sciences lab since 1983. Since 1991 he has written a monthly column in Pour la Science, the French version of Scientific American, dealing with mathematical games and recreations, logic, and computer science. He is a contributing author of the online scientific journal Interstices and a science and mathematics advisor to the Encyclopædia Britannica.

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