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,

#1751

Jan van Dijk

#20179

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jan A.G.M. van Dijk is professor emeritus of communication science at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, where he still works. His chair was called The Sociology of the Information Society. He lectured on the social aspects of the information society. Van Dijk was also Chair of the Centre for e-Government Studies and an advisor of and many governments and departments, including the European Commission and several Dutch ministries, city departments, and political parties.

#1752

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.

#1753

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.

#1754

Alan White

#9019

Overall Influence

Alan D. White is a University of Toronto finance professor, a specialist in financial engineering, best known for the Hull-White interest rate model and associated numerical procedures, authored with John Hull.

#1755

Jorge Nocedal

#15634

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jorge Nocedal is an applied mathematician, computer scientist and the Walter P. Murphy professor at Northwestern University who in 2017 received the John Von Neumann Theory Prize. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2020.

#1756

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 .

#1757

Philip L. Roe

#14141

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Philip L. Roe is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is known for his work in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics and Magnetohydrodynamics. Roe made fundamental contributions to the development of high-resolution schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws. He has developed approximate Riemann solver called Roe solver for compressible flows with shocks.

#1758

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.

#1759

John F. Hughes

#39810

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

John F. "Spike" Hughes is a Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. Contributions Hughes' research is in computer graphics, particularly those aspects of graphics involving substantial mathematics. He is perhaps best known as the co-author of many widely used textbooks in the field of computer graphics.

#1760

Marc Lankhorst

#17866

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Marc Martijn Lankhorst is a Dutch computer scientist, researcher and consultant, known for his publications on enterprise architecture, and as key developer of ArchiMate, a modelling language for enterprise architecture.

#1761

Bernhard Preim

#38425

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Bernhard Preim is a specialist in human–computer interface design as well as in visual computing for medicine. He is currently professor of visualization at University of Magdeburg, Germany. Preim received the diploma in computer science in 1994 and a PhD in 1998 from the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg . In 1999, he joined the staff of MeVis . In close collaboration with radiologists and surgeons, he directed the work on "computer-aided planning in liver surgery" and initiated several projects funded by the German Research Council in the area of computer-aided surgery. In June 2002, he received the Habilitation degree for computer science from the University of Bremen.

#1762

Andrew Ng

#44714

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a British-American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence . Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.

#1763

Chai Keong Toh

#24106

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Chai Keong Toh is a Singaporean computer scientist, engineer, industry director, former VP/CTO and university professor. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of California Berkeley, USA. He was formerly Assistant Chief Executive of Infocomm Development Authority Singapore. He has performed research on wireless ad hoc networks, mobile computing, Internet Protocols, and multimedia for over two decades. Toh's current research is focused on Internet-of-Things , architectures, platforms, and applications behind the development of smart cities.

#1764

Bill Griswold

#37388

Overall Influence

William G. Griswold is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. His research is in software engineering; he is best known for his works on aspect-oriented programming using AspectJ and on finding invariants of programs to support software evolution.

#1765

Len Sassaman

#23168

Overall Influence

1980 - 2011 (31 years)

Leonard Harris Sassaman was an American technologist, information privacy advocate, and the maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and operator of the randseed remailer. Much of his career gravitated towards cryptography and protocol development.

#1766

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.

#1767

Tim Howes

#23224

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Tim Howes is a software engineer, entrepreneur and author. He is the co-creator of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol , the Internet standard for accessing directory servers. He co-founded enterprise software company Opsware, internet browser company Rockmelt, and children's education company, Know Yourself. He has co-authored two books, several Internet RFCs, and holds several patents.

#1768

Rachid Guerraoui

#44927

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Rachid Guerraoui is a Moroccan-Swiss computer scientist and a professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , known for his contributions in the fields of concurrent and distributed computing. He is an ACM Fellow and the Chair in Informatics and Computational Science for the year 2018–2019 at Collège de France for distributed computing.

#1769

David Salesin

#38561

Overall Influence

David Salesin is an American computer scientist. He has worked in computer graphics, three-dimensional and four-dimensional mathematics, and photorealistic rendering. Until 2019, he was the Director of Snap Inc. Research Team, an affiliate professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering of the University of Washington in Seattle, and previously director of the Adobe Creative Technologies Lab. He is currently a Principal Scientist at Google.

#1770

Ed Chi

#50221

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Ed Huai-Hsin Chi is a Taiwanese American computer scientist and research scientist at Google, known for his early work in applying the theory of information scent to predict usability of websites. Biography Born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, Chi moved to Minnesota in the 9th grade. He obtained his BA in 1994, his MA in 1996 and his PhD in 1999, all at the University of Minnesota.

#1771

Mark Chignell

#34970

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mark H. Chignell is a Canadian academic specialising in usability and information science, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Toronto. Academic career He has a PhD in psychology , and an MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering .

#1772

Mathias Weske

#29315

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Mathias Weske is a German computer scientist, and Professor of Business Process Technology at the University of Potsdam, known for his contributions in the field of business process management and as a founder of the business Signavio.

#1773

Mehdi Jazayeri

#32053

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Mehdi Jazayeri is the founding dean of the faculty of informatics of the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, and author of several textbooks on computer software. He was awarded the Influential Educator Award in 2012 by the ACM SIGSOFT.

#1774

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 .

#1775

Michael Hinchey

#28423

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Michael Gerard Hinchey is an Irish computer scientist and former Director of the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre , a multi-university research centre headquartered at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He now serves as Head of Department of the Department of Computer Science & Information Systems at University of Limerick.

#1776

Marijn Heule

#21474

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Marienus Johannes Hendrikus Heule is a Dutch computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies SAT solvers. Heule has used these solvers to resolve mathematical conjectures such as the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem, Schur's theorem number 5, and Keller's conjecture in dimension seven.

#1777

James Cordy

#44362

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

James Reginald Cordy is a Canadian computer scientist and educator who is Professor Emeritus in the School of Computing at Queen's University. As a researcher he is most recently active in the fields of source code analysis and manipulation, software reverse and re-engineering, and pattern analysis and machine intelligence. He has a long record of previous work in programming languages, compiler technology, and software architecture.

#1778

William Aaron Woods

#32600

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

William Aaron Woods , generally known as Bill Woods, is a researcher in natural language processing, continuous speech understanding, knowledge representation, and knowledge-based search technology. He is currently a Software Engineer at Google.

#1779

Alan Winfield

#32739

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Alan Winfield is a British engineer and educator. He is Professor of Robot Ethics at UWE Bristol, Honorary Professor at the University of York, and Associate Fellow in the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He chairs the advisory board of the Responsible Technology Institute, University of Oxford.

#1780

Kurt Keutzer

#43717

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Kurt Keutzer is an American computer scientist. Early life and education Kurt Keutzer grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Maharishi University of Management in 1978, and a PhD in computer science from Indiana University in 1984.

#1781

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.

#1782

Alon Orlitsky

#41493

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Alon Orlitsky is an information theorist and the Qualcomm Professor for Information Theory and its Applications at University of California, San Diego. He received a BSc in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Ben Gurion University in 1981, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1986. He was a member of Bell Labs from 1986 to 1996, and worked for D. E. Shaw from 1996 to 1997. He joined UCSD in 1997.

#1783

Michael Howard Kay

Michael Howard Kay

#42777

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Michael Howard Kay Ph.D FBCS is the editor of the W3C XSLT 2.0 and 3.0 language specifications for performing XML transformations, and the developer of the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processing software.

#1784

Guy Doumeingts

#17565

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Guy Doumeingts is a French engineer, Emeritus professor at the University of Bordeaux 1 and former Director of "Laboratoire d’Automatique, Productique Signal et Image" control theory, known for the development of the GRAI method and his contributions to the field of Enterprise modelling.

#1785

Pierre-Arnoul de Marneffe

#35097

Overall Influence

Pierre-Arnoul Frédéric Guy Donat de Marneffe was a Belgian computer scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Liège . He studied civil engineering at the Faculté polytechnique de Mons and obtained a PhD in applied sciences at the University of Liège , in addition he obtained a Ph.D. in Computer science at Cambridge University in 1982.

#1786

Óscar Pastor

#37605

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Óscar Pastor is a Spanish computer scientist, Professor of software production methods at the Department of Information Systems and Computing of Universitat Politècnica de València, and the director of the Research Centre in Software Production Methods .

#1787

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...

#1788

Tim Teitelbaum

#40938

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Tim Teitelbaum is an American computer scientist known for his early work on integrated development environments , syntax-directed editing, and incremental computation. He is Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. As an educator and faculty member of the Cornell University Computer Science Department since 1973, he was recognized for his large-scale teaching of introductory programming, and for his mentoring of highly successful graduate students. As a businessman, he is known for having co-founded GrammaTech, Inc. and for having been its sole CEO from 1988 to 2019.

#1789

Shai Halevi

#39711

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Shai Halevi is a computer scientist who works on cryptography research at Amazon Web Services. Born in Israel in 1966, Halevi received a B.A. and M.Sc. in computer science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in 1991 and 1993. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997, and then joined IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he was a principal research staff member until 2019. Between 2019 and 2023, he has been a research fellow at Algorand Foundation, a blockchain startup founded by Silvio Micali.

#1790

Brian Henderson-Sellers

#30630

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Brian Henderson-Sellers is an English computer scientist residing in Sydney, Australia, and Professor of Information Systems at the University of Technology Sydney. He is also Director of the Centre for Object Technology and Applications at University of Technology Sydney.

#1791

Reynold B. Johnson

#7327

Overall Influence

1906 - 1998 (92 years)

Reynold B. Johnson was an American inventor and computer pioneer. A long-time employee of IBM, Johnson is said to be the "father" of the hard disk drive. Other inventions include automatic test scoring equipment and the videocassette tape.

#1792

Sajal K. Das

#43176

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Dr. Sajal K. Das is currently a Professor of Computer Science and the Daniel St. Clair Endowed Chair at Missouri University of Science and Technology , where he was the Chair of Computer Science Department during 2013-2017. Prior to that he was a University Distinguished Scholar Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and the founding director of the Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking at the University of Texas at Arlington. During 2008-2011 he served the US National Science Foundation as a Program Director in Computer Networks and Systems division of the CISE Directorate.

#1793

Jules Schwartz

#37190

Overall Influence

1927 - 2013 (86 years)

Jules I. Schwartz was an American computer scientist chiefly known for his creation of the JOVIAL programming language. He served in the United States Army in both World War II and the Korean War. He attended graduate school at Columbia University, where he received a Master of Arts in Mathematics in 1961. At Columbia Schwartz became acquainted with some early computers at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York. In 1954 he joined RAND Corporation where he developed utility software for the JOHNNIAC computer and worked on PACT compiler for the IBM 704. In 1955 he joined the MI...

#1794

Eugene Lawler

#28958

Overall Influence

1933 - 1994 (61 years)

Eugene Leighton Lawler was an American computer scientist and a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Academic life Lawler came to Harvard as a graduate student in 1954, after a three-year undergraduate B.S. program in mathematics at Florida State University. He received a master's degree in 1957, and took a hiatus in his studies, during which he briefly went to law school and worked in the U.S. Army, at a grinding wheel company, and as an electrical engineer at Sylvania from 1959 to 1961. He returned to Harvard in 1958, and completed his Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1962 under the supervision of Anthony G.

#1795

Gunther Eysenbach

Gunther Eysenbach

#20018

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Gunther Eysenbach is a German-Canadian researcher on healthcare, especially health policy, eHealth, and consumer health informatics. Career Eysenbach was born on 22 March 1967 in West Berlin, West Germany. While a medical student, he served on the executive board as elected communication director, later as vice-president of the European Medical Students' Association. He received an M.D. from the University of Freiburg and a Master of Public Health from Harvard School of Public Health. From 1999 to 2002 he founded and headed a research unit on cybermedicine and ehealth at the University of Heidelberg and organized and chaired the World Congress on Internet in Medicine.

#1796

Steven M. LaValle

#41988

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Steven M. LaValle is an American computer scientist, and a professor in the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Oulu. He was also an early founder and head scientist of Oculus VR until it was acquired by Facebook in 2014. He is best known for his work on rapidly exploring random trees , the Oculus Rift, and his book, Planning Algorithms, one of the most highly cited texts in the field.

#1797

Ben Taskar

#38863

Overall Influence

1977 - 2013 (36 years)

Ben Taskar was a professor and researcher in the area of machine learning and applications to computational linguistics and computer vision. He was a Magerman Term Associate Professor for Computer and Information Science at University of Pennsylvania. He co-directed PRiML: Penn Research in Machine Learning, a joint venture between the School of Engineering and Wharton. He was also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Public Policy. At the University of Washington, he held the Boeing Professorship.

#1798

Mitch Altman

#18755

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mitch Altman is a Berlin-based hacker and inventor of TV-B-Gone. He is a featured speaker at hacker conferences, an international expert on the hackerspace movement, and teaches introductory electronics workshops. He is also Chief Scientist and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.

#1799

Arvind Narayanan

Arvind Narayanan

#38197

Overall Influence

Arvind Narayanan is a computer scientist and a professor at Princeton University. Narayanan is recognized for his research in the de-anonymization of data. Biography Narayanan received technical degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2004. His advisor was C. Pandu Rangan. Narayanan received his PhD in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2009 under Vitaly Shmatikov. He worked briefly as a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University, working closely with Dan Boneh. Narayanan moved to Princeton University as an assistant professor in September 2012. H...

#1800

Maneesh Agrawala

#34629

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Maneesh Agrawala is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He returned to Stanford in 2015 as the director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, after nearly a decade on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

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