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,

#2701

Šarūnas Raudys

#45021

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Šarūnas Raudys is head of the Data Analysis Department at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics in Vilnius, Lithuania. Within the department, he is guiding the data mining and artificial neural networks group. His group's research interests include multivariate analysis, statistical pattern recognition, artificial neural networks, data mining methods and biological information processing systems with applications to analysis of technological, economical and biological problems.

#2702

Yoelle Maarek

#25881

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Yoelle Maarek is a Tunisian-born Israeli computer scientist. She is the Vice President of Worldwide Research at Amazon, responsible for Amazon's Alexa Shopping Research. Maarek is a researcher in the field of search engines and data mining, and a former vice president at Yahoo! and Director of Yahoo! in Israel and in India. Maarek was the first engineer of Google Israel and established the first development center in Haifa in 2006.

#2703

Jill P. Mesirov

Jill P. Mesirov

#29442

Overall Influence

Jill P. Mesirov is an American mathematician, computer scientist, and computational biologist who is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. She previously held an adjunct faculty position at Boston University and was the associate director and chief informatics officer at the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

#2704

Uri Zwick

#45458

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Uri Zwick is an Israeli computer scientist and mathematician known for his work on graph algorithms, in particular on distances in graphs and on the color-coding technique for subgraph isomorphism. With Howard Karloff, he is the namesake of the Karloff–Zwick algorithm for approximating the MAX-3SAT problem of Boolean satisfiability. He and his coauthors won the David P. Robbins Prize in 2011 for their work on the block-stacking problem.

#2705

Sankar Kumar Pal

#36268

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sankar Kumar Pal is a computer scientist and president of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He is a computer scientist with an international reputation on pattern recognition, image processing, fuzzy neural network, soft computing, granular mining, and machine intelligence. He founded the Machine Intelligence Unit in 1993, and the Center for Soft Computing Research: A National Facility in 2004, both at the ISI. He is the founder president of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, Kolkata Chapter.

#2706

Przemysław Prusinkiewicz

#46732

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Przemysław Prusinkiewicz is a Polish computer scientist who advanced the idea that Fibonacci numbers in nature can be in part understood as the expression of certain algebraic constraints on free groups, specifically as certain Lindenmayer grammars. Prusinkiewicz's main work is on the modeling of plant growth through such grammars.

#2707

Walter Brenner

#52545

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Walter Hermann Brenner is a Swiss academic, Professor of Information Management and Executive Director of the Institute for computer science of the University of St. Gallen. Biography Brenner studied Business Administration at the University of St. Gallen, where he subsequently became research assistant to Hubert Österle and in 1985 received his PhD.

#2708

Michael Grade

#29721

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Michael Ian Grade, Baron Grade of Yarmouth, is an English television executive and businessman. He has held a number of senior roles in television, including controller of BBC1 , chief executive of Channel 4 , chairman of the board of governors of the BBC , and executive chairman of ITV plc . Since 2011, he has been a Conservative Party life peer in the House of Lords.

#2709

Michael Franz

#52996

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Michael Franz is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on just-in-time compilation and optimisation and on artificial software diversity. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine , a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UCI, and Director of UCI's Secure Systems and Software Laboratory.

#2710

Rama Akkiraju

#54769

Overall Influence

Rama Akkiraju is an Indian-born American computer scientist. She is vice president of AI for IT at Nvidia and performs research in the field of artificial intelligence. Akkiraju started her career at the T. J. Watson Research Center in New York and later moved to IBM Almaden Research Center. She served as the Distinguished Engineer and Director of Engineering at IBM's Watson Division from 2015 to 2019.

#2711

Sophia Ananiadou

Sophia Ananiadou

#67724

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sophia Ananiadou is a Greek-British computer scientist and computational linguist. She led the development of and directs the National Centre for Text Mining in the United Kingdom. She is also Professor in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.

#2712

Dahlia Malkhi

#72392

Overall Influence

Dahlia Malkhi is an Israeli-American computer scientist who works on distributed systems and cryptocurrency. Education and career Malkhi earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, finishing her Ph.D. under the supervision of Danny Dolev. She taught at the Hebrew University until 2004, and then joined Microsoft Research at their Silicon Valley research center. In 2014, when Microsoft closed the center, she moved to VMware, a company working in cloud computing and platform virtualization.

#2713

Carl Chang

#71822

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Carl Kochao Chang is Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Human Computer Interaction and Director of Software Engineering Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University, where he served as its department chair from 2002 to 2013. He received a PhD in computer science from Northwestern University.

#2714

Brendan McKay

#17149

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Brendan Damien McKay is an Australian computer scientist and mathematician. He is currently an Emeritus Professor in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University . He has published extensively in combinatorics.

#2715

Wendy Seltzer

#27302

Overall Influence

Wendy Seltzer is an American attorney and, as of January 2023, a staff member at Tucows where she is the Principal Identity Architect. She is known for her many years of work with the World Wide Web Consortium, where, among many roles, she was the chair of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group.

#2716

S. Ziqing Li

#81489

Overall Influence

#2717

Yolanda Gil

#74663

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Yolanda Gil is a Spanish computer scientist specializing in knowledge discovery and knowledge-based systems at the University of Southern California . She served as chair of SIGAI the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence, and the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence .

#2718

Pascal Vitali Fua

#47311

Overall Influence

Pascal Fua is a computer science professor at EPFL . He received an engineering degree from École Polytechnique, Paris, in 1984 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Orsay in 1989. He joined EPFL in 1996. Before that, he worked at SRI International and at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a computer scientist.

#2719

Hasan Mukhtar

#81588

Overall Influence

#2720

Jan Kratochvíl

#27801

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Jan Kratochvíl is a Czech mathematician and computer scientist whose research concerns graph theory and intersection graphs. Kratochvíl was born on 10 February 1959 in Prague. He studied at Charles University in Prague, earning a master's degree in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1987; his dissertation, supervised by Jaroslav Nešetřil, combined graph theory with coding theory. He remained at Charles University as a faculty member, earned his habilitation in 1995, and was promoted to full professor in 2003. From 2003 to 2011 he chaired the department of applied mathematics at Charles University, and from ...

#2721

Nelson Max

#54162

Overall Influence

Nelson Max is a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University in 1967, advised by Herman Gluck. His research interests include scientific visualization, computer animation, photorealistic computer graphics rendering, multi-view stereo reconstruction, and augmented reality. In his visualization section, he worked on molecular graphics, and volume and flow visualization, particularly on irregular finite element meshes. He has rendered realistic lighting effects in clouds, trees, and water waves, and has pro...

#2722

Steven Murdoch

#27057

Overall Influence

Steven James Murdoch is Professor of Security Engineering in the Computer Science Department, University College London. His research covers privacy-enhancing technology, Internet censorship, and anonymous communication, in particular Tor. He is also known for discovering several vulnerabilities in the EMV bank chipcard payment system and for creating Tor Browser.

#2723

William Weston Cohen

#81667

Overall Influence

#2724

A. Stephen Morse

#32303

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

A. Stephen Morse is the Dudley Professor of distributed control and adaptive control in electrical engineering at Yale University. Early life and education Morse was born in Mt. Vernon, New York. He received his B.S. from Cornell University, his M.S. from the University of Arizona, and his Ph.D. from Purdue University.

#2725

Steven Muchnick

#72865

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Steven Stanley Muchnick was a noted computer science researcher, best known as author of the 1997 treatise on compilers, "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation." Background In 1974, Muchnick was awarded a PhD in computer science from Cornell University. After graduation, he became a professor at the University of Kansas, located in Lawrence, Kansas. During his tenure at that institution, he wrote several research papers, many of which were published in the Journal of the ACM.

#2726

Susanne Boll

#57558

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Susanne Boll is a Professor for Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. and is a member of the board at the research institute OFFIS. She is a member of SIGMM and SIGCHI of the ACM as well as the German Informatics Society GI. She founded and directs the HCI Lab at the University of Oldenburg and OFFIS.

#2727

Julia Lockheart

#25641

Overall Influence

Julia Lockheart is a British artist, academic and researcher. She is a Professor, Head of Contextual Practices, and Director of the Metadesign Research Centre at Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David; metadesign researcher and Associate Lecturer in Design Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London; and also as a design and language consultant to several educational institutions internationally.

#2728

Moni Naor

#81830

Overall Influence

#2729

Kim Bruce

#71202

Overall Influence

Kim B. Bruce is an American computer scientist. He is the Emeritus Reuben C. and Eleanor Winslow Professor of Computer Science at Pomona College, and was previously the Frederick Latimer Wells Professor of Computer Science at Williams College. He helped establish the computer science departments at both institutions. His work focuses on the design of programming languages.

#2730

Christophe de Dinechin

#55848

Overall Influence

Christophe de Dinechin is a French computer scientist, with contributions in video games, programming languages and operating systems. Programming languages Dinechin contributed to C++, notably a high-performance exception handling implementation that became a de-facto standard in the industry. de Dinechin was one of the proponents of a portable C++ ABI, initially developed for Itanium, but now widely used across platforms.

#2731

Paulo Pinheiro

#60112

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Paulo Pinheiro is a Brazilian American computer scientist working in the areas of provenance and semantic web in support of sciences. Pinheiro has been a research scientist at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Tetherless World Constellation since 2013. Between 2011 and 2013, he was a staff scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Between 2006 and 2012, he was an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at El Paso. Pinheiro is from a long line of scientists and engineers: his father is a retired professor of material scie...

#2732

Clive James

#699

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

Clive James was an Australian critic, journalist, broadcaster, writer and lyricist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1962 until his death in 2019. He began his career specialising in literary criticism before becoming television critic for The Observer in 1972, where he made his name for his wry, deadpan humour.

#2733

Qi Lu

#36269

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Lu Qi is a Chinese-American software executive and engineer who is the head of MiraclePlus, a startup incubator in China. Previously, Lu was the head of Y Combinator's China until it was shut down. He was formerly the chief operating officer of Baidu until he stepped down in May, 2018. He has served as the executive vice president of Microsoft, leading development of Bing, Skype, and Microsoft Office, and software engineer and manager for Yahoo!'s search technology division.

#2734

Lawrence Appel

#62226

Overall Influence

Lawrence J. Appel is the C. David Molina Professor of Medicine and Director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research at Johns Hopkins University, a joint program of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Appel is a primary care internist who holds a primary appointment in the Department of Medicine with joint appointments in the Department of Epidemiology, International Health, and Nursing. In addition, he directs the ProHealth Clinical Research Unit. The focus of his career is the conduct of clinical, epidem...

#2735

Robert Qiu

#28234

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Robert Caiming Qiu is a Chair Professor at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for his contributions to ultra-wideband wireless communications.

#2736

Ueli Maurer

#59634

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Ueli Maurer is a professor of cryptography at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich . Education Maurer studied electrical engineering at ETH Zurich and obtained his PhD in 1990, advised by James Massey. He joined Princeton University as a postdoc from 1990 to 1991.

#2737

Rita Cucchiara

#73134

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Rita Cucchiara is an Italian electrical and computer engineer, and professor in Computer engineering and Science in the Enzo Ferrari Department of Engineering at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy. She helds the courses of “Computer Architecture” and “Computer Vision and Cognitive Systems”. Cucchiara's research work focuses on artificial intelligence, specifically deep network technologies and computer vision for human behavior understanding and visual, language and multimodal generative AI. She is the scientific coordinator of the AImage Lab at UNIMORE and is director of the Artificial Intelligence Research and Innovation Center as well as the ELLIS Unit at Modena.

#2738

Varun Grover

#48801

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Varun Grover is an American Information systems researcher, who is the George & Boyce Billingsley Endowed Chair and distinguished professor at the Walton School of Business, University of Arkansas. From 2002-17, he was the William S. Lee Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at Clemson University, where he taught doctoral seminars on methods and information systems. He is consistently in the top 3 IS researchers in the world . He has an h-index of 100, among the top 5 in his field Grover has around 52,000 citations in Google Scholar and over 13,900 citations in Web of Science.

#2739

Geraldine Fitzpatrick

#57651

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Geraldine Fitzpatrick is an Australian professor and academic researcher who serves as the head of the Human-Computer Interaction Group at TU Wien since 2009. Her research is interdisciplinary at the intersection of social and computer sciences.

#2740

Daniel M. Russell

Daniel M. Russell

#60762

Overall Influence

Daniel M. Russell is an American computer scientist. Education Russell graduated from University of California at Irvine with a B.S. in Information and Computer Science . He received his M.S and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Rochester. His doctoral work was titled "Schema-Based Problem Solving" which was based on "using recombinations of pre-stored plans in sophisticated ways". While at University of Rochester, Russell did research work in "the neuropsychology of laterality, models of apraxia and aphasia, coordinated motor movements and computer vision".

#2741

Scott Klemmer

#58114

Overall Influence

Scott Klemmer is a human-computer interaction, user-centered design, usability, and computer science researcher and educator. He co-founded the Design Lab with Don Norman and Jim Hollan at the University of California San Diego in 2013. Klemmer is a professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and Computer Science and Engineering, and formerly at Stanford University. His former advisees include the founders of the unicorn startups Instagram and Instabase.

#2742

Rebecca Mercuri

#48760

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Rebecca Mercuri is a computer scientist specializing in computer security and computer forensics. She is considered a leading expert on electronic voting systems. Education Mercuri earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000 after defending her thesis on electronic voting. She was a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. From 2004–2005, she was a computer science fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, focusing on transparency and trust in computational systems.

#2743

Kaisa Nyberg

#27975

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Kaisa Nyberg is a Finnish cryptographer and computer security researcher. Contributions Nyberg's research includes the theory of perfect nonlinear S-boxes , provably secure block cipher design Education and career Nyberg received her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1980 from the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation, On Subspaces of Products of Nuclear Fréchet Spaces, was in topology, and was supervised by Edward Leonard Dubinsky.

#2744

Yejin Choi

#48284

Overall Influence

Yejin Choi is the Brett Helsel Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington. Her research considers natural language processing and computer vision. Early life and education Choi is from South Korea. She attended Seoul National University. After earning a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Choi moved to the United States, where she joined Cornell University as a graduate student. There she worked with Claire Cardie on natural language processing. After earning her doctorate, Choi joined Stony Brook University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. At Stony Brook U...

#2745

Rui de Figueiredo

#42600

Overall Influence

1929 - 2013 (84 years)

Rui José Pacheco de Figueiredo was an electrical engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, and a professor of electrical engineering, computer engineering, and applied mathematics at the University of California, Irvine.

#2746

Paul Davis

#33666

Overall Influence

Paul Davis is a British-American software developer best known for his work on audio software for the Linux operating system, and for his role as one of the first two programmers at Amazon.com. Davis grew up in the English Midlands and in London. After studying molecular biology and biophysics, he did post-graduate studies in computational biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot and EMBL in Heidelberg.

#2747

Boon Thau Loo

#50500

Overall Influence

Boon Thau Loo is a Singaporean-American computer scientist, college administrator, and technology entrepreneur. He is currently the RCA professor in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania where he leads a research lab working on distributed systems, and serves as the Associate Dean for Graduate Programs at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science.

#2748

Benjamin Geiger

#82501

Overall Influence

#2749

Paris Kanellakis

Paris Kanellakis

#51840

Overall Influence

1953 - 1995 (42 years)

Paris Christos Kanellakis was a Greek American computer scientist. Life and academic path Kanellakis was born on December 3, 1953, in Athens as the only child of General Eleftherios and Mrs. Argyroula Kanellakis.

#2750

Sidney Nolan

#6383

Overall Influence

1917 - 1992 (75 years)

Sir Sidney Robert Nolan was one of Australia's leading artists of the 20th century. Working in a wide variety of media, his oeuvre is among the most diverse and prolific in all of modern art. He is best known for his series of paintings on legends from Australian history, most famously Ned Kelly, the bushranger and outlaw. Nolan's stylised depiction of Kelly's armour has become an icon of Australian art.

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