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,

#1651

Daniel S. Weld

#28264

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Daniel Sabey "Dan" Weld is the Thomas J. Cable/WRF Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where he does research in automated planning and scheduling, software agents, and Internet information extraction. He is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle-based venture capital firm.

#1652

Kapali Eswaran

#40338

Overall Influence

Kapali Eswaran is one of the founding members of the IBM System R Project, which formed the genesis of relational database technology. Eswaran is a graduate of Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. He was an architect of IBM System R, the precursor to DB2. Eswaran was one of the inventors of SQL language. The Eswaran principle relating to database locking and transactions is a contribution that he made along with Jim Gray and Irv Traiger while working as a scientist at IBM Research. Subsequently, he launched Esvel, Inc. and Kaps Corporation . He is currently the CEO of...

#1653

Liu Sifeng

#11258

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Liu Sifeng is a Chinese systems engineer. He is the director of the Institute for Grey Systems Studies at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China. He is best known for his work on grey system theory.

#1654

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.

#1655

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.

#1656

Trevor Pearcey

#29703

Overall Influence

1919 - 1998 (79 years)

Trevor Pearcey was a British-born Australian scientist, who created CSIRAC, one of the first stored-program electronic computers in the world. Born in Woolwich, London, he graduated from Imperial College in 1940 with first class honours in physics and mathematics. He emigrated to Australia in 1945.

#1657

Francisco Herrera

#49192

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

#1658

Tao Yang

#44860

Overall Influence

Tao Yang is a Chinese-American computer scientist. Yang is the Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Ask.com for web search. He is also a tenured professor in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

#1659

Andrew Colin

#44622

Overall Influence

1936 - 2018 (82 years)

Andrew John Theodore Colin was a British university professor of computer science, born in 1936. He is a co-inventor of the widely used Binary Tree data structure. Professor Colin published 12 textbooks on various aspects of Computer Science, some of which have been translated into other languages.

#1660

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.

#1661

Peter Kogge

#38815

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Peter Michael Kogge is an American computer engineer and IBM Fellow. Background Kogge has been at the forefront of several innovations that have shaped the computing industry over the past three decades. While working on his PhD at Stanford in the 1970s, Kogge invented what is still today considered the fastest way of adding numbers in a computer, the Kogge–Stone Adder process, an approach still used in microprocessors by Intel and other companies.

#1662

James Larus

#39130

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

James R. Larus is an American computer scientist specializing in the fields of programming languages, compilers, and computer architecture. He is currently at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where he has served as the Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences from 2014 until 2021.

#1663

David Silver

#32994

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

David Silver is a principal research scientist at Google DeepMind and a professor at University College London. He has led research on reinforcement learning with AlphaGo, AlphaZero and co-lead on AlphaStar.

#1664

Rolf Pfeifer

#14717

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Rolf Pfeifer is a former professor of computer science at the Department of Informatics University of Zurich, and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he retired from in 2014. Currently he is a specially appointed professor at Osaka University, and a visiting professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

#1665

Ian Bell

#23835

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Ian Colin Graham Bell programmed, designed and developed the computer game Elite with David Braben, which met with much acclaim. Education Bell attended the independent St Albans School. He studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating with a degree in Mathematics in 1985, and a Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science in 1986.

#1666

Jacques Ferlay

#49654

Overall Influence

#1667

Aaron Bobick

#18614

Overall Influence

Aaron F Bobick is dean of the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bobick’s research is in the field of artificial intelligence and computer vision. He has chaired and published papers in top-tier academic conferences in these areas. His research and expert opinions on technology have also been reported in major news sources.

#1668

Deb Roy

#33856

Overall Influence

Deb Roy is a Canadian scientist, tenured professor at MIT, and the director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. Roy received a bachelor of applied science in computer engineering from the University of Waterloo, and a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. He previously was the executive director of the MIT Media Lab and directed the Cognitive Machines group at the Media Lab, and the Laboratory for Social Machines.

#1669

Henrik Wann Jensen

#24143

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Henrik Wann Jensen is a Danish computer graphics researcher. He is best known for developing the photon mapping technique as the subject of his PhD thesis, but has also done important research in simulating subsurface scattering and the sky.

#1670

Cris Kobryn

#22337

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Cris Kobryn is an American systems engineer and software engineer best known for leading international teams of vendors and users in defining the Unified Modeling Language v1 and v2 standards for software engineering, as well as the Systems Modeling Language v1 standard for systems engineering.

#1671

Mikkel Thorup

#36832

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Mikkel Thorup is a Danish computer scientist working at University of Copenhagen. He completed his undergraduate education at Technical University of Denmark and his doctoral studies at Oxford University in 1993. From 1993 to 1998, he was at University of Copenhagen and from 1998 to 2013 he was at AT&T Labs-Research in New Jersey. Since 2013 he has been at the University of Copenhagen as a Professor and Head of Center for Efficient Algorithms and Data Structures .

#1672

Charles Goldfarb

#20605

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Charles F. Goldfarb, is known as the father of Standard Generalized Markup Language and grandfather of HTML and the World Wide Web, also referred to as WWW, W3, or the Web. He co-invented the concept of markup languages.

#1673

Steve Deering

#22872

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Stephen Deering is a former Fellow at Cisco Systems, where he worked on the development and standardization of architectural enhancements to the Internet Protocol. Prior to joining Cisco in 1996, he spent six years at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, engaged in research on advanced Internet technologies, including multicast routing, mobile internetworking, scalable addressing, and support for multimedia applications over the Internet. He is a former member of the Internet Architecture Board, a past chair of numerous Working Groupss of the Internet Engineering Task Force , the inventor of IP multicast, and the lead designer of the new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6.

#1674

Lalith Gamage

#15497

Overall Influence

Professor Lalith Gamage , MBCS, MIEE is a Sri Lankan academic. He is a professor, currently serving as the president and Chief Executive Officer of Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology, a position he has held since the beginning of the institute in 1999. He has also served as the Chairman of the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Modern Technologies. As a leading Sri Lankan academic in the field of Computer Science, Prof Gamage has played an important role in the development of IT education, research and industry in Sri Lanka.

#1675

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.

#1676

Wojciech Rytter

#45438

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Wojciech Rytter is a Polish computer scientist, a professor of computer science in the automata theory group at the University of Warsaw. His research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms, and in particular on stringology, the study of algorithms for searching and manipulating text.

#1677

Ken Orr

#26638

Overall Influence

1939 - 2016 (77 years)

Kenneth T. Orr was an American software engineer, executive and consultant, known for his contributions in the field of software engineering to structured analysis and with the Warnier/Orr diagram. Education Orr received his BA in Mathematics and Physics in 1960 from Wichita State University, and his MA in Philosophy in 1963 from the University of Chicago.

#1678

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.

#1679

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.

#1680

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.

#1681

John Rosenberg

#32865

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

John Rosenberg is an Australian higher education consultant, professional Board Director, Australian academic, information technology professional and the former Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia.

#1682

Zhou Zhi-Hua

#49335

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Zhou Zhihua is a Chinese computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science at Nanjing University. He is the Standing Deputy Director of the National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, and Founding Director of the LAMDA Group. His research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mining.

#1683

Keith Winstein

#28933

Overall Influence

Keith Jonathan Winstein is a U.S. computer scientist and journalist. He is currently a professor at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Claude E. Shannon Research Assistant at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's Networks and Mobile Systems group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pursuing a Ph.D. under Hari Balakrishnan. Winstein is best known as the author of Mosh, the mobile shell, a UDP-based ssh replacement optimized for mobile users featuring predictive local echo, automatic roaming, and high network resiliency.

#1684

Habib Nafisi

#3791

Overall Influence

Habib Nafisi was the founder of Tehran Polytechnic . He founded it in 1958 with five engineering departments. He also founded the University of Mazandaran and Iran University of Science and Technology.

#1685

Chris Wallace

#29317

Overall Influence

1933 - 2004 (71 years)

Christopher Stewart Wallace was an Australian computer scientist and physicist. Wallace is notable for having devised:The minimum message length principle — an information-theoretic principle in statistics, econometrics, machine learning, inductive inference and knowledge discovery which can be seen both as a mathematical formalisation of Occam's Razor and as an invariant Bayesian method of model selection and point estimation,The Wallace tree form of binary multiplier ,a variety of random number generators,a theory in physics and philosophy that entropy is not the arrow of time,a refrigerati...

#1686

Eli Shamir

#29734

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Eliahu Shamir is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist, the Jean and Helene Alfassa Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Shamir earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in 1963, under the supervision of Shmuel Agmon. After briefly holding faculty positions at the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University, he returned to the Hebrew University in 1966, and was promoted to full professor in 1972.

#1687

Jim Woodcock

#25332

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

James Charles Paul Woodcock is a British computer scientist. Woodcock gained his PhD from the University of Liverpool. Until 2001 he was Professor of Software Engineering at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, where he was also a Fellow of Kellogg College. He then joined the University of Kent and is now based at the University of York, where, since October 2012, he has been head of the Department of Computer Science.

#1688

Vladimir Voevodin

Vladimir Voevodin

#30660

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Vladimir Voevodin is a computer scientist, professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics , Deputy Director of MSU Research Computing Center, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor, Dr.Sc.

#1689

Wolfgang Nebel

#38324

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Wolfgang Nebel is a German computer scientist and professor for integrated circuit design at the computer science department of the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. Biography Nebel holds a Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Leibniz University Hannover and a Dr.-Ing. degree from the Computer Science Department of the University of Kaiserslautern, where he has worked for Reiner Hartenstein. In 1987 Nebel joined Philips Semiconductors, Hamburg, and worked as software engineer, CAD project manager and finally became CAD software development manager. In 1993 he was ap...

#1690

Michael McRobbie

Michael McRobbie

#18385

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Michael Alexander McRobbie is an Australian–American computer scientist and university administrator. He served as the 18th president of Indiana University from 2007 to 2021. Upon stepping down from the IU presidency, McRobbie was replaced by Pamela Whitten, who became the 19th president of Indiana University on July 1, 2021. On July 1, 2021, he assumed the titles of university chancellor, president emeritus and university professor. He is the third person to serve as university chancellor in the university's more than 200-year-old history.

#1691

Shiraz Shivji

#15897

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Shiraz Shivji was the primary designer of the 1985 Atari ST computer, and one of the engineers of the Commodore 64. Biography Shiraz Shivji, born 1947 in what is now Tanzania, was of Indian Ismaili heritage. He was interested in electronics from an early age in what is now Tanzania. He was educated in the United Kingdom, where he obtained a first-class honours degree at the University of Southampton. He then moved to the United States, where he obtained a master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University during 1969–1973.

#1692

Paul Carl Kocher

#20039

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Paul Carl Kocher is an American cryptographer and cryptography entrepreneur who founded Cryptography Research, Inc. and served as its president and chief scientist. Education and early life Kocher grew up in Oregon. He received a bachelor's degree in biology from Stanford University in 1995, where he worked part-time with Martin Hellman. According to Hellman, Kocher is mostly self-taught in cryptography and already knew an amazing amount when they first met in Kocher's sophomore year. As demand for Kocher's knowledge in cryptography escalated, he gave up on his original plan to become a vete...

#1693

David Crane

#19830

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David Patrick Crane is an American video game designer and programmer. Crane originally worked in the field of hardware design for National Semiconductor. He went to college at DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering Technology degree in 1975. Crane started his programming career at Atari, making games for the Atari 2600. He also worked on the operating system for the Atari 800 computer. After meeting co-worker Alan Miller in a tennis game, Miller told Crane about a plan he had to leave Atari and found a company that would give game designers more recognition.

#1694

Subrata Roy

#7630

Overall Influence

Subrata Roy is an Indian-born inventor, educator, and scientist known for his work in plasma-based flow control and plasma-based self-sterilizing technology. He is a professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida and the founding director of the Applied Physics Research Group at the University of Florida.

#1695

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.

#1696

Hans-Jürgen Appelrath

#28676

Overall Influence

1952 - 2016 (64 years)

Hans-Jürgen Appelrath was a professor of computer science and information technology at the University of Oldenburg from 1987. Early career After graduating from high school in Duisburg in June 1970, Appelrath studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Bonn from 1970 to 1972. He then enrolled in the diploma course in computer science with minor in mathematics at the University of Dortmund, which he successfully completed in March 1977. From 1977 to 1983, he was a research associate of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Dortmund in various industrial collaboration projects.

#1697

Nobuyuki Otsu

#44407

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Nobuyuki Otsu graduated from the Department of Mathematical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Tokyo in 1969. He finished the master’s course in mathematics at the Department of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics of the University of Tokyo in 1971. Obtained Doctor of Engineering from University of Tokyo in 1981.

#1698

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.

#1699

Michael Fourman

Michael Fourman

#25713

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Michael Paul Fourman FBCS FRSE is Professor of Computer Systems at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK, and was Head of the School of Informatics from 2001 to 2009. Fourman is worked in applications of logic in computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science – more specifically, formal models of digital systems, system design tools, proof assistants, categorical semantics and propositional planning.

#1700

Nii Quaynor

#27690

Overall Influence

Nii Narku Quaynor is a Ghanaian scientist and engineer who has played an important role in the introduction and development of the Internet throughout Africa. Biography Quaynor graduated in engineering science from Dartmouth College in 1972, and received a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the Thayer School of Engineering in 1973. He then studied Computer Science, obtaining an M.S. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1974, and a Ph.D. from the same institution in 1977. He attended the Kinbu Secondary Technical School, Adisadel College and Achimota School in Ghana.

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