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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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#2851

Hans‐peter Seidel

#85089

Overall Influence

#2852

Andrew C. Heath

#83190

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Andrew C. Heath is the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine. He is known for his research on alcoholism and behavioral genetics. He received the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine's Distinguished Educator Award in 2009. His other awards include the International Society for Twin Studies's James Shields Award for Lifetime Contributions to Twin Research and the Distinguished Researcher Award from the Research Society on Alcoholism. He is a charter member of the Association for Psychological Science.

#2853

Kieron O'Hara

#36010

Overall Influence

Kieron O'Hara is a philosopher, computer scientist and political writer. He is an associate professor and principal research fellow within the department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton where he specialises in the politics, philosophy and epistemology of technology. He is also a research fellow at the Web Science Trust and the conservative think-tank, the Centre for Policy Studies.

#2854

Josef Pieprzyk

#70179

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Josef Pieprzyk is currently a professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He has worked on cryptography, in particular the XSL attack. He collaborated in the invention of the LOKI and LOKI97 block ciphers and the HAVAL cryptographic hash function.

#2855

Masahiro Irie

#85188

Overall Influence

#2856

Christopher Griffiths

#85208

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

#2857

Francesca Bria

#40874

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Francesca Bria is the President of the Italian National Innovation Fund. She is an Italian innovation economist and information technologist who lectures at various universities and is a consultant to the United Nations and the European Commission.

#2858

Matthew Stephens

#85252

Overall Influence

#2859

Bruce Donald

#42257

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Bruce Randall Donald is an American computer scientist and computational biologist. He is the James B. Duke Professor of Computer Science and Biochemistry at Duke University. He has made numerous contributions to several fields in Computer Science such as robotics, Microelectromechanical Systems , Geometric & physical algorithms and computational geometry, as well as in areas of Structural Molecular Biology & Biochemistry such as Protein design, Protein Structure Determination and Computational Chemistry.

#2860

Sohail Nadeem

#84315

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Sohail Nadeem is a Pakistani Professor of Applied Mathematics and Chairman of Mathematics Department at Quaid-i-Azam University. He is Young a Fellow of the world Academy of sciences and an elected Fellow of Pakistan Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the 2022 Obada Prize Award.

#2861

Brian Willison

#61856

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Brian Willison is owner and senior IT consultant at B. Willison & Associates. He is the former Executive Director of the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping at The New School and Program Management Officer at World Health Organization.

#2862

Jeni Tennison

#56352

Overall Influence

Jenifer Fays Alys Tennison is a British software engineer and consultant who co-chairs the data governance working group within the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence . She also serves on the board of directors of Creative Commons, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the information law and policy centre of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. She was previously Chief Executive Officer of the Open Data Institute .

#2863

John Watrous

#45239

Overall Influence

John Harrison Watrous is the Technical Director of IBM Quantum Education at IBM and was a professor of computer science at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, a member of the Institute for Quantum Computing, an affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary from 2002 to 2006 where he held a Canada Research Chair in quantum computing.

#2864

Harald Ganzinger

#68220

Overall Influence

1950 - 2004 (54 years)

Harald Ganzinger was a German computer scientist who together with Leo Bachmair developed the superposition calculus, which is used in most of the state-of-the-art automated theorem provers for first-order logic.

#2865

Iyad Rahwan

#57566

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Iyad Rahwan , is a Syrian-Australian scientist. He is the director of the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Between 2015 and 2020, he was an associate professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences, where he has investigated topics in computational social science, collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the social aspects of artificial intelligence.

#2866

Jerry L. Prince

#85476

Overall Influence

#2867

Kilnam Chon

#13832

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Kilnam Chon is a South Korean computer scientist. As a result of his contributions, South Korea became the second country in the world to have the IPv4 network , after the United States.<IEEE Communications Magazine, February 2013>

#2868

Louis-Philippe Morency

#81008

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Louis-Philippe Morency is a French Canadian researcher interested in human communication and machine learning applied to a better understanding of human behavior. Biography Dr. Louis-Philippe Morency is Leonardo Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was formerly research assistant professor at the University of Southern California and research scientist at USC Institute for Creative Technologies where he led the Multimodal Communication and Computation Laboratory . He received his Ph.D. from MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2006.

#2869

Claire Cardie

#74054

Overall Influence

Claire Cardie is an American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing. Since 2006, she has been a professor of computer science and information science at Cornell University, and from 2010 to 2011 she was the first Charles and Barbara Weiss Chair of Information Science at Cornell. Her research interests include coreference resolution and sentiment analysis.

#2870

Pierangela Samarati

#85618

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Pierangela Samarati from the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 for contributions to information security, data protection, and privacy. She was named a 2021 ACM Fellow "for contributions to data security and privacy".

#2871

Matt Welsh

#57538

Overall Influence

Matthew David Welsh is a computer scientist and software engineer and is currently the CEO and co-founder of Fixie.ai, which he started after stints at Google, xnor.ai, and Apple. He was the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and author of several books about the Linux operating system, several Linux HOWTOs, the LinuxDoc format and articles in the Linux Journal.

#2872

Richard Prince

#1994

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer. In the mid-1970s, Prince made drawings and painterly collages that he has since disowned. His image, Untitled , a photographic reproduction of a photograph by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement, was the first rephotograph to be sold for more than $1 million at auction at Christie's New York in 2005. He is regarded as "one of the most revered artists of his generation" according to The New York Times.

#2873

Zoe Stefanadis

#85750

Overall Influence

#2874

Andrew Martin

#62971

Overall Influence

Andrew Martin is a British computer scientist at the University of Oxford, England, where he is Professor of Systems Security, Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security and deputy director and lecturer in Software Engineering Programme. He is a member of the Oxford University Department of Computer Science.

#2875

Dmitry Khovratovich

#62513

Overall Influence

Dmitry Khovratovich is a cryptographer, currently a Lead Cryptographer for the Dusk Network, researcher for the Ethereum Foundation, and member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. He developed, together with Alex Biryukov, the Equihash proof-of-work algorithm which is currently being used as consensus mechanism for the Zcash cryptocurrency, and the Argon2 key derivation function, which won the Password Hashing Competition in July 2015.

#2876

Krishna Palem

#72751

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Krishna V. Palem is a computer scientist and engineer of Indian origin and is the Kenneth and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computing at Rice University and the director of Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics at Nanyang Technological University . He is recognized for his "pioneering contributions to the algorithmic, compilation, and architectural foundations of embedded computing", as stated in the citation of his 2009 Wallace McDowell Award, the "highest technical award made solely by the IEEE Computer Society".

#2877

Dean Allemang

#61874

Overall Influence

Dean Allemang is a computer scientist known for his work on the semantic web. He is the Principal Solutions Architect at data.world and the Principal Consultant at Working Ontologist LLC. Career Dean Allemang has a formal background, with an MSc in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge, England, and a PhD in Computer Science from The Ohio State University, United States. He was a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge.

#2878

David Zurakowski

#85897

Overall Influence

#2879

Ulrike Sattler

#58144

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Ulrike M. Sattler is a professor of computer science in the information management group of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and a visiting professor at the University of Oslo.

#2880

Martial Hebert

#86082

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

#2881

Philippa Gardner

#67401

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Philippa Anne Gardner is a British computer scientist and academic. She has been Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London since 2009. She was director of the Research Institute in Automated Program Analysis and Verification between 2013 and 2016. In 2020 Gardner was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

#2882

Padhraic Smyth

#85935

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Padhraic Smyth is a Professor of Computer Science in UC Irvine's Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. He also serves as Director of UC Irvine's Data Science Initiative and Associate Director for UC Irvine's Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems. He was elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2010 "for significant contributions to the theory and practice of statistical machine learning".

#2883

Satoru Miyano

#47332

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

is a professor and the director of the M&D Data Science Center at Tokyo Medical and Dental University. He was awarded fellowship of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2013 for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.

#2884

Virginia Dignum

Virginia Dignum

#62556

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Maria Virgínia Ferreira de Almeida Júdice Gamito Dignum is a Professor of Computer Science at Umeå University, and an Associated Professor at Delft University of Technology. She leads the Social and Ethical Artificial Intelligence research group. Her research and writing considers responsible AI and the development evaluation of human-agent team work, thereby aligning with Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence themes.

#2885

Chris Tofts

#59633

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Chris M. N. Tofts is an English computer scientist. Education Chris Tofts studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Clare College, Cambridge, followed by a Diploma in Computer Science from the same college. He went on to do a PhD supervised by Robin Milner in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

#2886

Pak Sham

#71206

Overall Influence

Pak Chung Sham is a psychiatric geneticist. He holds the Suen Chi-Sun Professorship in Clinical Science at the University of Hong Kong, where he is also the Chair Professor in Psychiatric Genomics, Director of the Centre for Genomic Sciences, and Director of Academic Developments in the Department of Psychiatry. He was a Professor of Psychiatric and Statistical Genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience from 2000 to 2006. He first joined the faculty of the University of Hong Kong as a visiting professor in 2004, where he became Chair Professor in Psychiatric Genomics in 2006.

#2887

Stefan Decker

#59794

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Stefan Decker is a computer scientist, Full Professor for Database and Information Systems at RWTH Aachen University, and managing director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology. He specializes in the Semantic Web. As of 25 January 2020, his research reached 21,206 Google Scholar Citations, making him one of the most influential Semantic Web researchers.

#2888

Amr El Abbadi

#27928

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Amr El Abbadi is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He obtained B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from Alexandria and Cornell universities respectively. He is an editor of the VLDB Journal and IEEE Transactions on Computers. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to the design of fault-tolerant large-scale data management systems.

#2889

Olia Lialina

#31632

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Olia Lialina is an Internet artist and theorist, an experimental film and video critic and curator. Life Lialina graduated in 1993 after studying film criticism and journalism at Moscow State University, followed by art residencies at C3 and Villa Waldberta .

#2890

Mona Diab

#72849

Overall Influence

Mona Talat Diab is a computer science professor and director of Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute. Previously, she was a professor at George Washington University and a research scientist with Facebook AI. Her research focuses on natural language processing, computational linguistics, cross lingual/multilingual processing, computational socio-pragmatics, Arabic language processing, and applied machine learning.

#2891

Yoshinobu Kanda

#86232

Overall Influence

#2892

Eric Paulos

#45004

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Eric Paulos is an American computer scientist, artist , and inventor, best known for his early work on internet robotic teleoperation and is considered a founder of the field of Urban Computing, coining the term "urban computing" in 2004. His current work is in the areas of emancipation fabrication, cosmetic computing, citizen science, New Making Renaissance, Critical Making, Robotics, DIY Biology, DIY culture, Micro-volunteering, and the cultural critique of such technologies through New Media strategies.

#2893

Ivan Stojmenović

#76530

Overall Influence

1957 - 2014 (57 years)

Ivan Stojmenović was a Serbian-Canadian mathematician and computer scientist well known for his contributions to communications networks and algorithms. He has published over 300 articles in his field and edited four handbooks in the area of wireless sensor networks.

#2894

Christos Davatzikos

#86293

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Christos Davatzikos is the Wallace T. Miller Sr. Professor of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to automatic analysis and interpretation of biomedical multi-dimensional data.

#2895

Diane Kelly

#68946

Overall Influence

Diane Kelly is an American computer scientist, notable for her work on the analysis of information seeking behaviours, and the development of experimental methods to support further research in the field. She is director of the faculties of Information Sciences and Communication & Information at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Kelly's work is strongly user-oriented, with human behaviour and interaction at the centre of her research. She received a simultaneous PhD in Information and Library Science and Cognitive Science Certificate from Rutgers University in 2004. She graduated with an...

#2896

Vijay Atluri

#75084

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Vijayalakshmi Atluri is an Indian computer scientist specialized in information systems security and database management. She is a professor of management science and information systems at Rutgers Business School – Newark. Atluri is an advisory board member of the computer science department at the University of the People.

#2897

Jeffrey Weitz

#76870

Overall Influence

Jeffrey Ian Weitz is a Canadian bioscientist, currently the Canada Research Chair in Thrombosis and Endowed Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine at McMaster University.

#2898

Tomás Lozano-Pérez

#76849

Overall Influence

Tomás Lozano-Pérez is a Cuban-American computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. On the MIT faculty since 1981, he conducts research in robotics, motion planning and geometric algorithms, and their applications.

#2899

Gerard J. Holzmann

Gerard J. Holzmann

#45308

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Gerard J. Holzmann is a Dutch-American computer scientist and researcher at Bell Labs and NASA, best known as the developer of the SPIN model checker. Biography Holzmann was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands and received an Engineer's degree in electrical engineering from the Delft University of Technology in 1976. He subsequently also received his PhD degree from Delft University in 1979 under Willem van der Poel and J.L. de Kroes with a thesis entitled Coordination problems in multiprocessing systems. After receiving a Fulbright Scholarship he was a post-graduate student at the University of S...

#2900

Geoffrey J. Gordon

#76876

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Geoffrey J. Gordon is a professor at the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and director of research at the Microsoft Montréal lab. He is known for his research in statistical relational learning and on anytime dynamic variants of the A* search algorithm. His research interests include multi-agent planning, reinforcement learning, decision-theoretic planning, statistical models of difficult data , computational learning theory, and game theory.

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