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 …

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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#3001

Issei Komuro

#88927

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

#3002

Louis Theroux

#1746

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Louis Sebastian Theroux is a British-American documentarian, journalist, broadcaster, and author. He has received three British Academy Television Awards and a Royal Television Society Television Award.

#3003

Andreas Gursky

#5488

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Andreas Gursky is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. He is known for his large format architecture and landscape colour photographs, often using a high point of view. His works reach some of the highest prices in the art market among living photographers. His photograph Rhein II was sold for $4,338,500 on 8 November 2011.

#3004

Stephen Robertson

#66234

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Stephen Robertson is a British computer scientist. He is known for his work on probabilistic information retrieval together with Karen Spärck Jones and the Okapi BM25 weighting model. Okapi BM25 is very successful in experimental search evaluations and found its way in many information retrieval systems and products, including open source search systems like Lucene, Lemur, Xapian, and Terrier. BM25 is used as one of the most important signals in large web search engines, certainly in Microsoft Bing, and probably in other web search engines too. BM25 is also used in various other Microsoft prod...

#3005

Christine Paulin-Mohring

#60812

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Christine Paulin-Mohring is a mathematical logician and computer scientist, and Professor Faculté des Sciences at Paris-Saclay University, best known for developing the interactive theorem prover Coq.

#3006

Tie‐yan Liu

#89027

Overall Influence

#3007

Jimy Dudhia

#89030

Overall Influence

#3008

Jana Košecká

#57925

Overall Influence

Jana Košecká is a Slovak computer scientist specializing in computer vision. She is a professor of computer science at George Mason University. Previously, Košecká was a researcher at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

#3009

Andreas Lothe Opdahl

#67016

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Andreas Lothe Opdahl is a Norwegian computer scientist and Professor of Information Systems Development at the University of Bergen, known for his theory about Security requirements engineering, and for with Guttorm Sindre coining the term Misuse case.

#3010

Bill Joy

#54628

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

William Nelson Joy is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at the company until 2003.

#3011

Markus Kuhn

#47443

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Markus Guenther Kuhn is a German computer scientist, currently working at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge and a fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. Education Kuhn was educated at University of Erlangen , he received his Master of Science degree at Purdue University and PhD at the University of Cambridge.

#3012

Bruce Davie

#75820

Overall Influence

Bruce Davie is a noted Australian computer scientist known for his work in the networking field. He has co-authored several textbooks, including Computer Networks: A Systems Approach. Dr. Davie received his B.E. from the University of Melbourne in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1988.

#3013

Chang Ming Li

#89152

Overall Influence

#3014

Hiroshi Yamazaki

#89182

Overall Influence

#3015

Dilma Da Silva

#83774

Overall Influence

Dilma Menezes Da Silva is a Brazilian-American systems software researcher known for her work in cloud computing. She holds the Ford Motor Company Design Professorship II at Texas A&M University, and is head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M.

#3016

Kerrie Holley

#42126

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Kerrie Lamont Holley is an American software architect, author, researcher, consultant, and inventor. He recently joined Industry Solutions, Google Cloud. Previously he was with UnitedHealth Group / Optum, their first Technical Fellow, where he focused on ideating healthcare assets and solutions using IoT, AI, graph database and more. His main focus centered on advancing AI in healthcare with an emphasis on deep learning and natural language processing. Holley is a retired IBM Fellow. Holley served as vice president and CTO at Cisco responsible for their analytics and automation platform. Ho...

#3017

Ruo Yuan

#89270

Overall Influence

#3018

Yaacov Choueka

#73182

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Yaacov Choueka was a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University, where he served as head of the institute for Information Retrieval and Computational Linguistics. Until 2017, he headed Genazim - the computer unit of the Friedberg project for the study of the Genizah. His areas of expertise included systems for retrieving textual information, large textual databases, computerized processing of natural languages, especially in Hebrew, computer analysis of text, computerized dictionaries, mechanized morphology and syntax, and in electronic publishing.

#3019

Diego Calvanese

#80150

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Diego Calvanese is an Italian computer scientist and professor at the faculty of computer science at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. In addition, since 2019, he is Wallenberg Visiting Professor at the department of computing science, Umeå University. He is well known for his scientific contributions in knowledge representation and reasoning in AI, description logics, and database theory.

#3020

Lin Yi-bing

#45623

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Lin Yi-bing or Jason Lin is a Taiwanese academic who has served as the Chair Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Chiao Tung University since 1995, and since 2002, the Chair Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Information Management , at Providence University, a Catholic university in Taiwan. He also serves as Vice President of the National Chiao Tung University.

#3021

Apostolos Gerasoulis

#59774

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Apostolos Gerasoulis is a Greek professor of computer science at Rutgers University, and the co-creator of Teoma, an Internet search engine that powers Ask.com, which Apostolos co-founded along with his colleagues at Rutgers in 2000. Apostolos later went on to serve as the vice president of search technology at Ask.com, before leaving the company in 2010. Gerasoulis has appeared in TV commercials for Ask.com.

#3022

Joost-Pieter Katoen

#82892

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Joost-Pieter Katoen is a Dutch theoretical computer scientist based in Germany. He is distinguished professor in Computer Science and head of the Software Modeling and Verification Group at RWTH Aachen University. Furthermore, he is part-time associated to the Formal Methods & Tools group at the University of Twente.

#3023

Michael J Frisch

#89451

Overall Influence

#3024

Alfonse T. Masi

#89457

Overall Influence

#3025

Jeffrey Owen Kephart

#49340

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jeffrey Owen Kephart is an electrical engineer at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Kephart was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for his contributions to autonomic computing. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1987, under Richard H. Pantell.

#3026

Michael Saunders

#61597

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Michael Alan Saunders is an American numerical analyst and computer scientist. He is a research professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Saunders is known for his contributions to numerical linear algebra and numerical optimization and has developed many widely used software packages, such as MINOS, NPSOL, and SNOPT.

#3027

Leon Presser

#67519

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Leon Presser is an American professor, entrepreneur, writer and software engineer. He was honored by the White House as an influential Hispanic leader. Academics Presser obtained a BS degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1961. He then moved to Los Angeles, California, and went to work in the nascent computer industry as a computer designer. At the same time, he pursued a master's degree in Electrical Engineering , which he received from the USC in 1964. He then joined the computer research group at UCLA, where he simultaneously commenced his studies for a PhD in...

#3028

Harold Thimbleby

#70582

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Harold W. Thimbleby is a British professor of computer science at Swansea University, Wales. He is known for his works on user interface design within the realm of human computer interaction. Overview Harold Thimbleby held the post of director of UCLIC, University College London's Interaction Centre, from its establishment in 2001. From 2001 to 2004, he was also the 28th Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London. Thimbleby founded the Future Interaction Technology Lab at Swansea University in 2005.

#3029

Mark Dean

#26885

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Mark E. Dean is an American inventor and computer engineer. He developed the ISA bus, and he led a design team for making a one-gigahertz computer processor chip. He holds three of nine PC patents for being the co-creator of the IBM personal computer released in 1981. In 1995, Dean was named the first ever African-American IBM Fellow.

#3030

John Tsotsos

#19837

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

John Tsotsos is a Canadian Computer Scientist whose research spans the fields of Computer Vision, Human Vision, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence. He is best known for his work in visual attention, specifically for establishing the need for visual attention in both biological and computational systems through an argument based on the computational complexity of visual information processing and subsequently developing a computational framework for visual attention known as the Selective Tuning model. He is also acknowledged as a pioneer in the area of Active Vision, his students and he being first to propose strategies for active object recognition and object visual search by a robot.

#3031

Jianchang Mao

#75385

Overall Influence

Jianchang Mao is a Chinese-American computer scientist and Vice President, Google Assistant Engineering at Google. His research spans artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational advertising, data mining, and information retrieval. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 for his contributions to pattern recognition, search, content analysis, and computational advertising.

#3032

Amanda Randles

#53883

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Amanda Randles is an American computer scientist who is the Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Duke University. Randles is an associate professor of biomedical engineering with secondary appointments in computer science, mathematics, and mechanical engineering and materials science. She is a member of the Duke Cancer Institute. Her research interests include biomedical simulation, machine learning, computational fluid dynamics, and high-performance computing.

#3033

Pierluigi Crescenzi

#79300

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Pierluigi Crescenzi is a full professor of computer science at the Gran Sasso Science Institute. His research areas include theoretical computer science and computer science education. He has been teaching at Sapienza University of Rome, University of Florence and Université Paris Diderot.

#3034

Richard Socher

#89607

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

#3035

Ahto Buldas

#82479

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Ahto Buldas is an Estonian computer scientist. He is the inventor of Keyless Signature Infrastructure, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Guardtime and Chair of the OpenKSI foundation. Life and education Buldas was born in Tallinn. After graduating from high school, he was conscripted in to the Soviet Army where he spent 2 years as an artillery officer in Siberia. After being discharged, he started studies in Tallinn University of Technology, where he defended his MSc degree in 1993 and his PhD in 1999. He currently lives in Tallinn with his wife and four children.

#3036

William Allan Walker

#89641

Overall Influence

#3037

Franklin S. Cooper

#35717

Overall Influence

1908 - 1999 (91 years)

Franklin Seaney Cooper was an American physicist and inventor who was a pioneer in speech research. Biography He attended the University of Illinois where he received his undergraduate degree in physics in 1931, and received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. In 1935, with Caryl Haskins, he founded Haskins Laboratories, a nonprofit research laboratory that is located in New Haven, Connecticut, and studied speech and language. His primary interest was in speech synthesis and perception, which led him to invent the pattern playback, an early electromechanical device for synthesizing speech.

#3038

Roderic Grupen

#57430

Overall Influence

Rod Grupen is a professor of Computer science and director of the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst. Grupen's research integrates signal processing, control, dynamical systems, learning, and development as a means of constructing intelligent systems. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal, conference, and workshop papers. Grupen is the co-editor-in-chief of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing . In 20...

#3039

John Hershberger

#75421

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

John E. Hershberger is an American computer scientist and software professional, a principal engineer at Mentor Graphics Corporation since 1993. He is known for his research in computational geometry and algorithm engineering.

#3040

Susan S Taylor

#89842

Overall Influence

#3041

Kozo Kaibuchi

#89855

Overall Influence

#3042

Bruno Courcelle

#56189

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Bruno Courcelle is a French mathematician and computer scientist, best known for Courcelle's theorem in graph theory. Life Courcelle earned his Ph.D. in 1976 from the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, then called IRIA, under the supervision of Maurice Nivat. He then joined the Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique at the University of Bordeaux 1, where he remained for the rest of his career. He has been a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France since 2007.

#3043

Richard L Wahl

#89944

Overall Influence

#3044

Alan Merten

#30594

Overall Influence

1941 - 2020 (79 years)

Alan Gilbert Merten was the fifth president of George Mason University. Personal life Merten was married to Sally Merten, and they had two children and four grandsons. Merten died on May 21, 2020, at a nursing home in Naples, Florida after a battle with Parkinson’s disease.

#3045

Alice K. Jacobs

#75923

Overall Influence

Alice K. Jacobs is a professor at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine who specializes in interventional cardiology, coronary revascularization, and sex-based differences in cardiovascular disease.

#3046

Ulrich Heber

#89997

Overall Influence

#3047

Graham Harding

#66597

Overall Influence

1937 - 2018 (81 years)

Graham Frederick Anthony Harding of Aston University was the first professor of clinical neurophysiology in the United Kingdom. He was the first to recognise that television broadcasts and video games could trigger epilepsy. The Harding test was named after him.

#3048

Paris Smaragdis

#81719

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Paris Smaragdis is a computer scientist noted for his contributions to audio signal processing, computer audition, and machine learning. He is currently an associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. He currently holds over 35 patents in the areas of audio signal processing and machine learning.

#3049

Thomas Neumann

#52570

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Thomas Neumann is a German computer scientist and full professor for Data Science and Engineering at the Technical University of Munich . Education and career Thomas Neumann finished his studies in business informatics at the University of Mannheim in 2001 and received his doctor's degree in computer science under the supervision of Guido Moerkotte in 2005. He then worked as a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken with Gerhard Weikum. During this time, Neumann developed RDF-3X, a system for graph databases. He habilitated in 2010 at Saarland University.

#3050

Gerhard Fischer

Gerhard Fischer

#67444

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Gerhard Fischer is a German-born computer scientist who is Professor of Computer Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the founder and director of the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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