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.

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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,

#1401

Richard Wallace

#30201

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Richard S. Wallace is an American author of AIML and Botmaster of A.L.I.C.E. . He is also the founder of the A.L.I.C.E Artificial Intelligence Foundation. Dr. Wallace's work has appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, CNN, ZDTV and in numerous foreign language publications across Asia, Latin America and Europe.

#1402

Luke Tierney

#26389

Overall Influence

Luke Tierney is an American statistician and computer scientist. A fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics since 1988 and of the American Statistical Association since 1991, Tierney is currently a professor of statistics at the University of Iowa. Through his past work on programming languages such as R and Lisp, Tierney now holds a position on the developing team known as the R Core.

#1403

Ron Sun

#18415

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Ron Sun is a cognitive scientist who made significant contributions to computational psychology and other areas of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. He is currently professor of cognitive sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and formerly the James C. Dowell Professor of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at University of Missouri. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from Brandeis University.

#1404

Xu Zeshui

#40304

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

#1405

John Hughes

#30128

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

R. John M. Hughes, born , is a computer scientist and professor in the department of Computing Science at the Chalmers University of Technology. Contributions In 1984, Hughes received his PhD from the University of Oxford for the thesis "The Design and Implementation of Programming Languages".

#1406

Jerry Kaplan

#24030

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Samuel Jerrold "Jerry" Kaplan is an American computer scientist, author, futurist, and entrepreneur. He is best known as a pioneer in the field of pen computing and tablet computers. He is the founder of numerous companies, including GO Corporation, whose technology was used to develop the first smartphone and tablet PC. Kaplan is the co-founder of OnSale, the first B2C online auction site launched in 1994, five months prior to eBay. He is a recipient of the 1998 Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award and author of the best-selling book Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure. He h...

#1407

Jie Wu

#27091

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jie Wu is a Chinese computer scientist. He is the Associate Vice Provost for International Affairs and Director for Center for Networked Computing at Temple University. He also serves as the Laura H. Carnell professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He served as Program Director of Networking Technology and Systems at the National Science Foundation from 2006 to 2008.

#1408

Jaime Teevan

#28985

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Jaime Teevan is an American computer scientist and Microsoft executive known for her work on AI and productivity. Education and background Teevan received a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University. As an undergraduate, she sold her senior thesis to Infoseek, an early web search engine. In it she invented an early approach to using the web link graph to support information seeking.

#1409

Eli Upfal

#22455

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Eli Upfal is a computer science researcher, currently the Rush C. Hawkins Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics and statistics at the Hebrew University, Israel in 1978, received an M.Sc. in computer science from the Feinberg Graduate School of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel in 1980, and completed his PhD in computer science at the Hebrew University in 1983 under Eli Shamir. He has made contributions in a variety of areas. Most of his work involves randomized and/or online algorithms, stochastic processes, or the probabilistic analysis of deterministic algorithms.

#1410

David P. Dobkin

#19492

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

David Paul Dobkin is an American computer scientist and the Phillip Y. Goldman '86 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. His research has concerned computational geometry and computer graphics.

#1411

Alan Burns

#37100

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Professor Alan Burns FREng FIET FBCS FIEEE CEng is a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of York, England. He has been at the University of York since 1990, and held the post of Head of Department from 1999 until 30 June 2006, when he was succeeded by John McDermid.

#1412

Henry Kučera

#10982

Overall Influence

1925 - 2010 (85 years)

Henry Kučera , born Jindřich Kučera , was a Czech-American linguist who pioneered corpus linguistics, linguistic software, a major contributor to the American Heritage Dictionary, and a pioneer in the development of spell checking computer software. He is remembered in particular as one of the initiators of the Brown Corpus.

#1413

Danny Dolev

#28602

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Daniel Dolev is an Israeli computer scientist known for his research in cryptography and distributed computing. He holds the Berthold Badler Chair in Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a member of the scientific council of the European Research Council.

#1414

David W. Barron

#33149

Overall Influence

1935 - 2012 (77 years)

David William Barron FBCS was a British academic in Physics and Computer Science who was described in the Times Higher Education magazine as one of the "founding fathers" of computer science. Family He married his wife, Valerie. They had two children: Nik and Jacky.

#1415

Prith Banerjee

#17966

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Prithviraj "Prith" Banerjee is an Indian American academic and computer scientist and is currently the Chief Technology Officer at ANSYS and board member at Cray and CUBIC. Previously, he was a Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry where he was responsible for IOT and Digital Transformation Advisory Services within the Global Industrial Practice. Before that he was the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Schneider Electric. He was formerly a senior vice president of research at Hewlett Packard and director of HP Labs. Previously he was the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of ABB Group.

#1416

Nikolaos Bourbakis

#19040

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nikolaos G. Bourbakis is a Greek computer scientist known for his work in image processing. , he is Ohio Board of Regents Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and director of both the Information Technology Research Institute and the Assistive Technologies Research at Wright State University in Ohio, United States. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools.

#1417

Olivier Faugeras

#26141

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Olivier Dominique Faugeras is a French computer scientist and director of research at Inria Sophia Antipolis. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Technologies, and recipient of the 2014 Okawa Prize for his pioneering contributions to computer vision and computational neuroscience.

#1418

Rayid Ghani

#20158

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Rayid Ghani is a Distinguished Career Professor in the Machine Learning Department and the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, he was the director of the Center for Data Science and Public Policy, research associate professor in the department of computer science, and a senior fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He was also the co-founder of Edgeflip, an analytics startup that grew out of the Obama 2012 Campaign, focused on social media products for non-profits, advocacy groups, and charities.

#1419

Sue Black

#18142

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Susan Elizabeth Black is a British computer scientist, academic and social entrepreneur. She is known for saving Bletchley Park, with her Saving Bletchley Park campaign. Since 2018, she has been Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist at Durham University. She was previously based at the University of Westminster and University College London.

#1420

Deepak B. Phatak

Deepak B. Phatak

#19784

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Deepak B. Phatak is an Indian computer scientist and academic, and a recipient of the Padma Shri Award for his contribution in science and technology in 2013. He is known for his notable work for upgrading Aakash, advertised by its manufacturer as the 'world's cheapest tablet'. In 2009, he was ranked one of the 50 most powerful people in India.

#1421

Jeff Koons

#651

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Jeffrey Lynn Koons is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.

#1422

Hao Li

#30296

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Hao Li is a computer scientist, innovator, and entrepreneur from Germany, working in the fields of computer graphics and computer vision. He is co-founder and CEO of Pinscreen, Inc, as well as associate professor of computer vision at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence . He was previously a Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, and former director of the Vision and Graphics Lab at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. He was also a visiting professor ...

#1423

Krzysztof R. Apt

#27066

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Krzysztof R. Apt is a Polish computer scientist. He defended his PhD in mathematical logic in Warsaw, Poland in 1974. His research interests include program correctness and semantics, use of logic as a programming language, distributed computing, and game theory. Besides his own research, he has been heavily involved in service to the computing community, notably by promoting the use of logic in computer science and by advocating open access to scientific literature.

#1424

Colin Percival

#24127

Overall Influence

Colin A. Percival is a Canadian computer scientist and computer security researcher. He completed his undergraduate education at Simon Fraser University and a doctorate at the University of Oxford. While at university he joined the FreeBSD project, and achieved some notoriety for discovering a security weakness in Intel's hyper-threading technology. Besides his work in delta compression and the introduction of memory-hard functions, he is also known for developing the Tarsnap online backup service, which became his full-time job.

#1425

Anders P. Ravn

#31265

Overall Influence

1947 - 2019 (72 years)

Anders Peter Ravn was a Danish computer scientist. Anders P. Ravn was born in 1947 in Caracas, Venezuela, the son of Niels and Henny Ravn. He arrived in Denmark in 1948. Ravn received a Master of Science degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Copenhagen in 1973 and a Doctor of Technology degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Denmark in 1995.

#1426

Frank Rowlett

#9215

Overall Influence

1908 - 1998 (90 years)

Frank Byron Rowlett was an American cryptologist. Life and career Rowlett was born in Rose Hill, Lee County, Virginia and attended Emory & Henry College in Emory, Virginia. In 1929 he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and chemistry. He was hired by William Friedman as a "junior cryptanalyst" for the Signals Intelligence Service on April Fools' Day 1930; shortly after, he was followed into SIS by Abraham Sinkov and Solomon Kullback.

#1427

Ronald Kaplan

#21305

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Ronald M. Kaplan has served as a Vice President at Amazon.com and Chief Scientist for Amazon Search . He was previously Vice President and Distinguished Scientist at Nuance Communications and director of Nuance' Natural Language and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Prior to that he served as Chief Scientist and a Principal Researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information . He was previously a Research Fellow at the Palo...

#1428

Tracy Camp

#27709

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Tracy Kay Camp is an American computer scientist noted for her research on wireless networking. She is also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. She was the co-chair of CRA-W from 2011 to 2014 and she was the co-chair of ACM-W from 1998 to 2002.

#1429

Wanda Orlikowski

Wanda Orlikowski

#8240

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Wanda J. Orlikowski is a US-based organizational theorist and Information Systems researcher, and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#1430

David Plaisted

#28743

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

David Alan Plaisted is a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Research interests Plaisted's research interests include term rewriting systems, automated theorem proving, logic programming, and algorithms. His research accomplishments in theorem proving include work on the recursive path ordering, the associative path ordering, abstraction, the simplified and modified problem reduction formats, ground reducibility, nonstandard clause form translations, rigid E-unification, Knuth–Bendix completion, replacement rules in theorem proving, instance-based th...

#1431

Richard P. Brent

#26221

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Richard Peirce Brent is an Australian mathematician and computer scientist. He is an emeritus professor at the Australian National University. From March 2005 to March 2010 he was a Federation Fellow at the Australian National University. His research interests include number theory , random number generators, computer architecture, and analysis of algorithms.

#1432

Frank Pfenning

#25855

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Frank Pfenning is a German-American professor of computer science, adjunct professor in the department of philosophy, and head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Education and career Pfenning grew up in Rüsselsheim in Germany. He studied mathematics and computer science at Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. He then moved to the US and studied at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. in the Department of Mathematics in 1987, for his dissertation entitled Proof Transformations in Higher-Order Logic. He was a student of Peter B....

#1433

Rafail Ostrovsky

#30238

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Rafail Ostrovsky is a distinguished professor of computer science and mathematics at UCLA and a well-known researcher in algorithms and cryptography. Biography Rafail Ostrovsky received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1992.

#1434

Hans-Peter Kriegel

#34977

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Hans-Peter Kriegel is a German computer scientist and professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and leading the Database Systems Group in the Department of Computer Science. He was previously professor at the University of Würzburg and the University of Bremen after habilitation at the Technical University of Dortmund and doctorate from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

#1435

Nikita Borisov

#34710

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Nikita Borisov is a cryptographer and computer security researcher, currently an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . His notable work includes one of the first cryptanalyses of the WEP wireless encryption protocol together with Ian Goldberg and David Wagner, and the design of the Off-the-Record Messaging protocol with Goldberg.

#1436

Alexander Ollongren

Alexander Ollongren

#17189

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Alexander Ollongren is a professor emeritus at Leiden University. He serves on the Advisory Council of METI . Personal life Alexander Ollongren was born on November 9, 1928, on a coffee plantation in Kepahiang, in the southwestern part of Sumatra, Netherlands East Indies. His father, Alexander Ollongren , was born in Kyiv in Kiev Governorate, and was of mixed Finnish and Swedish descent. He was a member of the Finnish noble family Ållongren. His mother, Selma Hedwig Adèle Jaeger , was of Dutch and German heritage. The family moved to Java in early 1932 and lived in Yogyakarta, while the Japanese army occupied the Netherlands East Indies in 1942.

#1437

Cherri M. Pancake

#26206

Overall Influence

Cherri M. Pancake is an ethnographer and computer scientist who works as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and Intel Faculty Fellow at Oregon State University, and as the director of the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science & Engineering. She is known for her pioneering work on usability engineering for high performance computing. In 2018 she was elected for a two-year term as president of the Association for Computing Machinery.

#1438

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.

#1439

Ian H. Witten

#30985

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

#1440

Te Sun Han

#27495

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Te Sun Han is a Korean Japanese information theorist and winner of the 2010 Shannon Award. He has made significant contributions concerning the interference channel and information spectrum methods. In 1990, he was elected an IEEE Fellow for contributions to the theory of multiuser information systems and distributed signal detection systems.

#1441

Friedemann Mattern

Friedemann Mattern

#38379

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Friedemann Mattern is a German scientist. After studying computer science with a minor in communication sciences at the University of Bonn, Mattern became a VLSI design and parallelism researcher at Kaiserslautern University of Technology. He got his doctorate degree in 1989 after writing a dissertation on distributed algorithms. In 1991 Mattern was offered a teaching position at Saarland University in Saarbrücken; in 1994 he moved to the Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. In 1999 Mattern responded to ETH Zurich's call for the establishment of a Ubiquitous Computing research group.

#1442

Lennart Johnsson

#33653

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Lennart Johnsson is a Swedish computer scientist and engineer. Johnsson started his career at ABB in Sweden and moved on to UCLA, Caltech, Yale University, Harvard University, the Royal Institute of Technology , and Thinking Machines Corporation. He is currently based at the University of Houston, where he holds the Hugh and Lillie Roy Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Electrical and Computer Engineering as a lecturer at a summer school at the KTH PDC Center for High Performance Computing.

#1443

David P. Williamson

David P. Williamson

#24979

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

David Paul Williamson is a professor of operations research at Cornell University, and the editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. in 1993 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Michel Goemans, and is best known for his work with Goemans on approximation algorithms based on semidefinite programming, for which they won the Fulkerson Prize in 2000. He also received the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize in 2013. In 2022 he received the AMS Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research.

#1444

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 .

#1445

Christopher Langton

Christopher Langton

#12612

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Christopher Gale Langton is an American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life. He coined the term in the late 1980s when he organized the first "Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. Following his time at Los Alamos, Langton joined the Santa Fe Institute , to continue his research on artificial life. He left SFI in the late 1990s, and abandoned his work on artificial life, publishing no research since that time.

#1446

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.

#1447

Leon Sterling

#27795

Overall Influence

Professor Leon Sterling is a career academic with a distinguished academic record. After completing a PhD at the Australian National University, he worked for 15 years at universities in the UK, Israel and the United States. He returned to Australia as Professor of Computer Science at the University of Melbourne in 1995. He served as Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering for 6 years. After stepping down as Head, he took up an industry-sponsored chair becoming the Adacel Professor of Software Innovation and Engineering. In 2010, he moved to Swinburne where he served as Dean...

#1448

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...

#1449

Lambert Meertens

#29936

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Lambert Guillaume Louis Théodore Meertens or L.G.L.T. Meertens is a Dutch computer scientist and professor. , he is a researcher at the Kestrel Institute, a nonprofit computer science research center in Palo Alto's Stanford Research Park.

#1450

Eiichi Goto

#16554

Overall Influence

1931 - 2005 (74 years)

Eiichi Goto was a Japanese computer scientist, the builder of one of the first general-purpose computers in Japan. Biography Goto was born on January 26, 1931, in Shibuya, Tokyo. After attending Seikei High School he went to Tokyo University, where he graduated in 1953. He continued his graduate studies at Tokyo in physics under the supervision of Hidetoshi Takahashi, earning his doctorate in 1962. He became a faculty member at Tokyo in 1959. In 1968, he became the chief scientist of the Information Science Laboratory at RIKEN, a position he held until 1991. However, he continued to hold a position at Tokyo University as well, becoming a full professor there in 1970.

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