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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#2201

Héctor García-molina

#66569

Overall Influence

#2202

Sture Allén

#15643

Overall Influence

1928 - 2022 (94 years)

Sture Allén was a Swedish professor of computational linguistics at the University of Gothenburg, who was the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy between 1986 and 1999. Born in Gothenburg, he was elected to chair 3 of the Swedish Academy in 1980. He was also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.

#2203

Ying Xu

#15190

Overall Influence

Ying Xu is a computational biologist and bioinformatician, and a chair professor under the title 'Regents-Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar' in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Institute of Bioinformatics at the University of Georgia, USA.

#2204

Toby Walsh

#49178

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Toby Walsh is Chief Scientist at UNSW.ai, the AI Institute of UNSW Sydney. He is a Laureate fellow, and professor of artificial intelligence in the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales and Data61 . He has served as Scientific Director of NICTA, Australia's centre of excellence for ICT research. He is noted for his work in artificial intelligence, especially in the areas of social choice, constraint programming and propositional satisfiability. He has served on the Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligen...

#2205

Peter Lyman

#24100

Overall Influence

1940 - 2007 (67 years)

George Peter Lyman was an American professor of information science who taught at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, and was well known in U.S. academia for his research on online information and his leadership in remaking university library systems for the digital era.

#2206

Vijay Vaishnavi

Vijay Vaishnavi

#32648

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Vijay Kumar Vaishnavi is a noted researcher and scholar in the computer information systems field with contributions mainly in the areas of design science research, software engineering, and data structures & algorithms, authoring over 150 publications including seven books in these and related areas, and co-owning a patent. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the Department of Computer Information Systems, Georgia State University. He is Senior Editor Emeritus of MIS Quarterly and is on the editorial boards of a number of other major journals. His research has been funded by the National Sc...

#2207

Dale L. Goodhue

#45128

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Dale Louis Goodhue is an American Information systems researcher, and Professor Emeritus at the Management Information Systems Department of the University of Georgia, known for his work on enterprise systems and data management in large organizations.

#2208

Michael T. Goodrich

#49487

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Michael T. Goodrich is a mathematician and computer scientist. He is a distinguished professor of computer science and the former chair of the department of computer science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

#2209

Brent Waters

#59668

Overall Influence

Brent R. Waters is an American computer scientist, specializing in cryptography and computer security. He is currently a professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. Career Waters attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he graduated in 2000 with a BS in computer science. He earned a PhD in computer science from Princeton University in 2004.

#2210

Jennifer Mankoff

#48191

Overall Influence

Jennifer Mankoff is the Richard E. Ladner Endowed Professor and Associate Director for Diversity and Inclusion in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where she joined the faculty in 2017.

#2211

Andrew Blake

#32276

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Andrew Blake FREng, FRS, is a British scientist, former laboratory director of Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft Distinguished Scientist, former director of the Alan Turing Institute, Chair of the Samsung AI Centre in Cambridge, honorary professor at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a leading researcher in computer vision.

#2212

Robert R Wolfe

#66850

Overall Influence

#2213

Erwin Engeler

#29261

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Erwin Engeler is a Swiss mathematician who did pioneering work on the interrelations between logic, computer science and scientific computation in the 20th century. He was one of Paul Bernays' students at the ETH Zürich.

#2214

Azer Bestavros

#9204

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Azer Bestavros , is the Inaugural Associate Provost for Computing and Data Sciences and the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Boston University. Prior to his appointment in 2019 to lead the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences, he was the Founding Director of The Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. He joined Boston University in 1991 as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, which is part of the university's College of Arts & Sciences. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 1998 and to the rank of full professor in 2003.

#2215

Philipp Koehn

#51232

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Philipp Koehn is a computer scientist and researcher in the field of machine translation. His primary research interest is statistical machine translation and he is one of the inventors of a method called phrase based machine translation. This is a sub-field of statistical translation methods that employs sequences of words as the basis of translation, expanding the previous word based approaches. A 2003 paper which he authored with Franz Josef Och and Daniel Marcu called Statistical phrase-based translation has attracted wide attention in Machine translation community and has been cited over a thousand times.

#2216

Anantha P. Chandrakasan

#66924

Overall Influence

#2217

Yakov Rekhter

#10194

Overall Influence

Yakov Rekhter is a well-known network protocol designer and software programmer. He was heavily involved in internet protocol development, and its predecessors, from their early stages. Dr. Rekhter was one of the leading architects and a major software developer of the NSFNET Backbone Phase II. He co-designed the Border Gateway Protocol , the core routing protocol of the Internet. He was also one of the lead designers of Tag Switching , BGP/MPLS based VPNs, and MPLS Traffic Engineering. Among his most recent activities is the work on MPLS Multicast, Multicast in VPLS, and Multicast in BGP/MPLS VPNs .

#2218

Miron Livny

#39769

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Miron Livny is a senior researcher and professor specializing in distributed computing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Livny has been a professor of computer science at Wisconsin since 1983, where he leads the HTCondor high-throughput computing system project. Miron is also a principal investigator and currently the facility coordinator for the Open Science Grid project, Director of the Center for High Throughput computing, CTO of Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, and Director of Core Computational Technology of the Morgridge Institute for Research.

#2219

Peter Todd

#17680

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Peter Todd is a Canadian professor and academic administrator. He was the dean of McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management from 2005 to 2014. From July 2015 to October 2020, he has served as the director of HEC Paris.

#2220

Yehuda Lindell

#42499

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Yehuda Lindell is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University where he conducts research on cryptography with a focus on the theory of secure computation and its application in practice. Lindell currently leads the cryptography team at Coinbase.

#2221

Yu Hu

#15327

Overall Influence

Yu Jeffrey Hu is a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller College of Business. He is a Digital Fellow at MIT's Initiative on Digital Economy. Career Hu's research has been published in leading journals such as Management Science, Review of Financial Studies, Information Systems Research, Management Information Systems Quarterly, and MIT Sloan Management Review, as well as in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, InformationWeek, Wired Magazine, TIME Magazine, and INC. Magazine.

#2222

Bill Plympton

#9978

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Bill Plympton is an American animator, graphic designer, cartoonist, and filmmaker best known for his 1987 Academy Awards-nominated animated short Your Face and his series of shorts featuring a dog character starting with 2004's Guard Dog.

#2223

Mark S. Fox

#30100

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mark Stephen Fox is a Canadian computer scientist, Professor of Industrial Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Urban Systems Engineering at the University of Toronto, known for the development of Constraint Directed Scheduling in the 1980s and the TOVE Project to develop an ontological framework for enterprise modeling and enterprise integration in the 1990s.

#2224

Peter J. Schwartz

#67249

Overall Influence

#2225

David W. Bradley

#51169

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

David W. Bradley is a video game designer and programmer, most notable for the role-playing video games Wizardry V, VI, and VII. Career Bradley was originally a music studies student when he learned about music composition software. He learned how to program to write his own software on the university mainframe and eventually began writing games. This translated into a job in the computer industry as a game designer and programmer. His early work includes Parthian Kings for Avalon Hill. After Robert Woodhead left the Wizardry video game series, Bradley co-designed Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom with Andrew C.

#2226

Abass Alavi

#14234

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Abass Alavi is an Iranian-American physician-scientist specializing in the field of molecular imaging, most notably in the imaging modality of positron emission tomography . In August 1976, he was part of the team that performed the first human PET studies of the brain and whole body using the radiotracer [18F]Fluorodeoxyglucose . Alavi holds the position of Professor of Radiology and Neurology, as well as Director of Research Education in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. Over a career spanning five decades, he has amassed over 2,300 publications and 60,000 citat...

#2227

Yongguang Zhang

#56488

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Yongguang Zhang from Microsoft Research Asia, China was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to software radio technology. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University in 1994. From 2001 to 2003, he was an adjunct assistant professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, an area editor for MC2R, was a guest editor for ACM MONET Journal.

#2228

Blair MacIntyre

#25763

Overall Influence

Blair MacIntyre is a Professor and Director of the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology working in the field of augmented reality. Career After completing his doctorate at Columbia University in 1998, MacIntyre moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology where he founded and was appointed director of the newly-formed Augmented Environments Lab. In 2010 MacIntyre was named as the director of the Qualcomm Augmented Reality Game Studio. Currently, MacIntyre works as a Principal Research Scientist in Mozilla's Emerging Technologies team.

#2229

Laura M. Haas

#47587

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Laura M. Haas is an American computer scientist noted for her research in database systems and information integration. She is best known for creating systems and tools for the integration of heterogeneous data from diverse sources, including federated technology that virtualizes access to data, and mapping technology that enables non-programmers to specify how data should be integrated.

#2230

Imrich Chlamtac

#21995

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Imrich Chlamtac was born in Zlaté Moravce, Slovakia, where in 2015, he received an Honorary Citizenship. Professor Chlamtac is the President of EAI, the European Alliance For Innovation., a private non-profit organization hosting conferences Through its international presence and being the largest European professional community in information technologies and their applications, EAI is dedicated to making information technologies a catalyst for the improvement of society, to advance worldwide research communities and help professionals build their career in an open, innovative community driven environment.

#2231

Daniel Rader

#64563

Overall Influence

Daniel James Rader is an American academic physician and the Seymour Gray Professor of Molecular Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the chief of the Perelman School of Medicine's Division of Translational Medicine and Human Genetics and the director of its Preventive Cardiovascular Program. He is recognized for his research into the genetic underpinnings of atherosclerosis and lipoprotein metabolism.

#2232

George Karypis Karypis

#67462

Overall Influence

#2233

Michael Elad

#52547

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Michael Elad is a professor of Computer Science at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. His work includes fundamental contributions in the field of sparse representations, and deployment of these ideas to algorithms and applications in signal processing, image processing and machine learning.

#2234

Bernt Schiele

#67474

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Bernt Schiele is a German computer scientist. He is Max Planck Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and professor at Saarland University. He is known for his work in the field of computer vision and perceptual computing.

#2235

Michael J. Karels

#42562

Overall Influence

Michael J. Karels is an American Software Engineer and one of the key people in history of BSD UNIX. In 1993, the USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award to the Computer Systems Research Group at University of California, Berkeley, honoring 180 individuals, including Karels, who contributed to the CSRG's 4.4BSD-Lite release.

#2236

Janusz Kacprzyk

Janusz Kacprzyk

#58904

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Janusz Kacprzyk is a Polish engineer and mathematician, notable for his contributions to the field of computational and artificial intelligence tools like fuzzy sets, mathematical optimization, decision making under uncertainty, computational intelligence, intuitionistic fuzzy sets, data analysis and data mining, with applications in databases, ICT, mobile robotics and others.

#2237

Hemchandra Kekre

Hemchandra Kekre

#27924

Overall Influence

1935 - 2014 (79 years)

Hemchandra Baburao Kekre was a professor, author, and head of the Computer Science Department at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Kekre was among the initial professors who started the computer science department at IIT Mumbai.

#2238

Bob Rau

#42495

Overall Influence

1951 - 2002 (51 years)

Bantwal Ramakrishna "Bob" Rau was a computer engineer and HP Fellow. Rau was a founder and chief architect of Cydrome, where he helped develop the Very long instruction word technology that is now common in modern computer processors. Rau was the recipient of the 2002 Eckert–Mauchly Award.

#2239

Rafi Ahmed

#18634

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Rafi Ahmed is an Indian-American virologist and immunologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Emory University, where he is also the director of the Emory Vaccine Center and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Vaccine Research. In 2009, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

#2240

Woody Bledsoe

#45550

Overall Influence

1921 - 1995 (74 years)

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Bledsoe was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and prominent educator. He is one of the founders of artificial intelligence , making early contributions in pattern recognition, facial recognition, and automated theorem proving. He continued to make significant contributions to AI throughout his long career.

#2241

Gerald Friedland

#58103

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Gerald Friedland is an adjunct professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley. He also maintains an affiliation with the International Computer Science Institute.

#2242

Jim Davies

#52754

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Jim Davies is Professor of Software Engineering and current Director of the Software Engineering Programme at the University of Oxford, England. Biography Jim Davies studied mathematics at New College, Oxford, joining the Oxford University Computing Laboratory in 1986 for a Masters' and Doctorate. After working as a researcher and lecturer in computer science, at Oxford, Reading, and Royal Holloway, University of London, he became a lecturer in software engineering at Oxford in 1995. He has led the Software Engineering Programme since 2000, and was made Professor of Software Engineering in 20...

#2243

David Kuck

#42636

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

David J. Kuck, a graduate of the University of Michigan, was a professor in the Computer Science Department the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1965 to 1993. He is the father of Olympic silver medalist Jonathan Kuck. While at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign he developed the Parafrase compiler system , which was the first testbed for the development of automatic vectorization and related program transformations. In his role as Director of the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development , Kuck led the construction of the CEDAR project, a hierarchical shared...

#2244

Warren Strober

#67932

Overall Influence

#2245

Shay Kutten

#59352

Overall Influence

Shay Kutten is an Israeli computer scientist who holds the William M. Davidson Chair in Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. He is with the Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences. His research involves Network Algorithms, distributed computing, and Network Security.

#2246

Elaine Rich

#55708

Overall Influence

Elaine Alice Rich is an American computer scientist, known for her textbooks on artificial intelligence and automata theory and for her research on user modeling. She is retired as a distinguished senior lecturer from the University of Texas at Austin.

#2247

Cordelia Schmid

#57458

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Cordelia Schmid is computer vision researcher, currently Head of the THOTH project team at INRIA , Montbonnot, France. Schmid obtained a degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, and her doctorate from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, with a prizewinning thesis on "Local Greyvalue Invariants for Image Matching and Retrieval".

#2248

Christopher Soghoian

Christopher Soghoian

#18485

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Christopher Soghoian is a privacy researcher and activist. He is currently working for Senator Ron Wyden as the senator’s Senior Advisor for Privacy & Cybersecurity. From 2012 to 2016, he was the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union.

#2249

Robin Murphy

#42584

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Robin Roberson Murphy is an American computer scientist and roboticist. She is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. She is known as a founder of the fields of rescue robotics and human-robot interaction and for inserting robots into disasters. Her case studies of how unmanned systems under perform in the field led cognitive systems engineering researcher David Woods to pose the Murphy's Law of Autonomy: a deployment of robotic systems will fall short of the target level of autonomy, creating or exacerbating a shortfall in mechanisms for coordination with human problem holders.

#2250

Reihaneh Safavi-Naini

#21271

Overall Influence

Reihaneh "Rei" Safavi-Naini is the NSERC/Telus Industrial Research Chair and the Alberta Innovates Strategic Chair in Information Security at the University of Calgary, Canada. Education Reihaneh received her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Waterloo, Canada, under supervision of Prof. Ian F. Blake. She obtained her BSc and MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions