The Most Influential People Across History
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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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#451
Wendy Hall
#5410
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Dame Wendy Hall is a British computer scientist. She is Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Early life and education Wendy Hall was born in west London and educated at Ealing Grammar School for Girls. She studied for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in mathematics at the University of Southampton. She completed her Bachelor of Science degree in 1974, and her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1977. Her doctoral thesis was titled Automorphisms and coverings of Klein surfaces. She later completed a Master of Science degree in Computing at City University ...
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Claude Sammut
#8368
Overall Influence
Claude Sammut is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of New South Wales and Head of the Artificial Intelligence Research Group. He was appointed as a Trustee of RoboCup in 2012.
Go to Profile#453
Philippe Flajolet
#6093
Overall Influence
1948 - 2011 (63 years)
Philippe Flajolet was a French computer scientist. Biography A former student of École Polytechnique, Philippe Flajolet received his PhD in computer science from University Paris Diderot in 1973 and state doctorate from Paris-Sud 11 University in 1979. Most of Philippe Flajolet's research work was dedicated towards general methods for analyzing the computational complexity of algorithms, including the theory of average-case complexity. He introduced the theory of analytic combinatorics. With Robert Sedgewick of Princeton University, he wrote the first book-length treatment of the topic, the 2009 book entitled Analytic Combinatorics.
Go to Profile#454
David Waltz
#8575
Overall Influence
1943 - 2012 (69 years)
David Leigh Waltz was a computer scientist who made significant contributions in several areas of artificial intelligence, including constraint satisfaction, case-based reasoning and the application of massively parallel computation to AI problems. He held positions in academia and industry and at the time of his death, was a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University where he directed the Center for Computational Learning Systems.
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R. C. T. Lee
#3111
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
R. C. T. Lee , also known as Richard C. T. Lee, received his B.Sc. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering of National Taiwan University and Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley.
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Phil Zimmermann
#3252
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Philip R. Zimmermann is an American computer scientist and cryptographer. He is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy , the most widely used email encryption software in the world. He is also known for his work in VoIP encryption protocols, notably ZRTP and Zfone. Zimmermann is co-founder and Chief Scientist of the global encrypted communications firm Silent Circle.
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Ruzena Bajcsy
#3783
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ruzena Bajcsy is an American engineer and computer scientist who specializes in robotics. She is professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also director emerita of CITRIS .
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Zvi Galil
#4060
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Zvi Galil is an Israeli-American computer scientist and mathematician. Galil served as the president of Tel Aviv University from 2007 through 2009. From 2010 to 2019, he was the dean of the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing. His research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, computational complexity and cryptography. He has been credited with coining the terms stringology and sparsification. He has published over 200 scientific papers and is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.
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Hubert Zimmermann
#6017
Overall Influence
1941 - 2012 (71 years)
Hubert Zimmermann was a French software engineer and a pioneer of computer networking. Biography Zimmermann was educated at École Polytechnique and École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications.
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Mehryar Mohri
#8750
Overall Influence
Mehryar Mohri is a Professor and theoretical computer scientist at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He is also a Research Director at Google Research where he heads the Learning Theory team.
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Henry Baker
#7972
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Henry Givens Baker Jr. is an American computer scientist who has made contributions in garbage collection, functional programming languages, and linear logic. He was one of the founders of Symbolics, a company that designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines. In 2006 he was recognized as a Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery.
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Ujjwal Maulik
#3400
Overall Influence
Ujjwal Maulik is an Indian computer scientist and a professor. He is the former chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. He also held the position of the principal-in-charge and the head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Kalyani Government Engineering College.
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Lynn Conway
#3130
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Lynn Ann Conway is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance. She initiated the Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution in very large scale integrated microchip design. That revolution spread rapidly through the research universities and computing industries during the 1980s, incubating an emerging electronic design automation industry, spawning the modern 'foundry...
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Paritosh Pandya
#9107
Overall Influence
Paritosh K. Pandya is an Indian computer scientist based at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. Since 2020, he is an adjunct professor at IIT Bombay. Paritosh Pandya studied for a BE degree in Electronics at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda , MTech degree in Computer Science at IIT Kanpur , and a PhD in Computer Science at Bombay University/TIFR .
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Tommaso Toffoli
#4410
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Tommaso Toffoli is an Italian-American professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University where he joined the faculty in 1995. He has worked on cellular automata and the theory of artificial life , and is known for the invention of the Toffoli gate.
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Jaime Carbonell
#7340
Overall Influence
1953 - 2020 (67 years)
Jaime Guillermo Carbonell was a computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the development of natural language processing tools and technologies. His extensive research in machine translation resulted in the development of several state-of-the-art language translation and artificial intelligence systems. He earned his B.S. degrees in Physics and in Mathematics from MIT in 1975 and did his Ph.D. under Dr. Roger Schank at Yale University in 1979. He joined Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of computer science in 1979 and lived in Pittsburgh from then. He was affilia...
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Nir Shavit
#7664
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Nir Shavit is an Israeli computer scientist. He is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Tel Aviv University and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Hugh Darwen
#5623
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Hugh Darwen is a computer scientist who was an employee of IBM United Kingdom from 1967 to 2004, and has been involved in the development of the relational model. Work From 1978 to 1982 he was a chief architect on Business System 12, a database management system that faithfully embraced the principles of the relational model. He worked closely with Christopher J. Date and represented IBM at the ISO SQL committees until his retirement from IBM. Darwen is the author of The Askew Wall and co-author of The Third Manifesto, a proposal for serving object-oriented programs with purely relational dat...
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Sandy Petersen
#3631
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Carl Sanford Joslyn "Sandy" Petersen is an American game designer. He worked at Chaosium, contributing to the development of RuneQuest and creating the acclaimed and influential horror role-playing game Call of Cthulhu. He later joined id Software where he worked on the development of the Doom franchise and Quake.
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Léon Bottou
#9407
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Léon Bottou is a researcher best known for his work in machine learning and data compression. His work presents stochastic gradient descent as a fundamental learning algorithm. He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology , and the maintainer of DjVuLibre, the open source implementation of DjVu. He is the original developer of the Lush programming language.
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Alistair Sinclair
#8013
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Alistair Sinclair is a British computer scientist and computational theorist. Sinclair received his B.A. in mathematics from St. John’s College, Cambridge in 1979, and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh in 1988 under the supervision of Mark Jerrum. He is professor at the Computer Science division at the University of California, Berkeley and has held faculty positions at University of Edinburgh and visiting positions at DIMACS and the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley.
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Jack Elton Bresenham
#9977
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Jack Elton Bresenham is a former professor of computer science. Biography Bresenham retired from 27 years of service at IBM as a Senior Technical Staff Member in 1987. He taught for 16 years at Winthrop University and has nine patents. He has four children.
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Kathy Pham
#7474
Overall Influence
Kathy Pham is a Vietnamese American computer scientist and product management executive. She has held roles in leadership, engineering, product management, and data science at Google, IBM, the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Harris Healthcare, and served as a founding product and engineering member of the United States Digital Service in the Executive Office of the President of the United States at The White House. Pham was the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Product and Engineering at the Federal Trade Commission, and the inaugural Executive Director of the National AI Advisory Committe...
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Rudolf Bayer
#6889
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Rudolf Bayer is a German computer scientist. He is professor emeritus of Informatics at the Technical University of Munich where he had been employed since 1972. He is noted for inventing three data sorting structures: the B-tree , the UB-tree and the red–black tree.
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Gil Kalai
#5175
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Gil Kalai is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Henry and Manya Noskwith Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, Professor of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, and adjunct Professor of mathematics and of computer science at Yale University, United States.
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Lawrence M. Breed
#8747
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Lawrence Moser "Larry" Breed was a computer scientist, artist and inventor, best known for his involvement in the programming language APL. Career As an undergraduate at Stanford University in 1961, he created the first computer animation language and system and used it at Stanford football half-times to coordinate images produced by a 100 ft-by-100 ft array of rooters holding up colored cards.
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Charles H. Lindsey
#8926
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Charles Hodgson Lindsey was a British computer scientist, most known for his involvement with the programming language ALGOL 68. He was an editor of the Revised Report on Algol 68, and co-wrote a ground breaking book on the language An Informal Introduction to Algol 68, which was unusual because it was written so that it could be read horizontally or vertically depending on how a reader wanted to learn the language.
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Börje Langefors
#7660
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
Börje Langefors was a Swedish engineer and computer scientist, Emeritus Professor of Business Information Systems at the Department of Computer and Systems Science, Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and "one of those who made systems development a science."
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Vern Paxson
#8617
Overall Influence
Vern Edward Paxson is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He also leads the Networking and Security Group at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. His interests range from transport protocols to intrusion detection and worms. He is an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force community and served as the chair of the IRTF from 2001 until 2005. From 1998 to 1999 he served on the IESG as Transport Area Director for the IETF.
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Fred W. Glover
#8571
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Fred Glover is Chief Scientific Officer of Entanglement, Inc., USA, in charge of algorithmic design and strategic planning for applications of combinatorial optimization in quantum computing. He also holds the title of Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, associated with the College of Engineering and Applied Science and the Leeds School of Business. He is known for his innovations in the area of metaheuristics including the computer-based optimization methodology of Tabu search an adaptive memory programming algorithm for mathematical optimiza...
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Richard E. Stearns
#4559
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Richard Edwin Stearns is an American computer scientist who, with Juris Hartmanis, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory". In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
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Randal L. Schwartz
#8869
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Randal L. Schwartz , also known as merlyn, is an American author, system administrator and programming consultant. He has written several books on the Perl programming language, and plays a promotional role within the Perl community. He was a co-host of FLOSS Weekly.
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Alex Waibel
#9276
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Alexander Waibel is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Waibel's research interests focus on speech recognition and translation and human communication signals and systems. Waibel is known for the time delay neural network , which he developed. It is the first convolutional neural network trained by gradient descent, using the backpropagation algorithm. Alex Waibel introduced the TDNN 1987 at ATR in Japan.
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L. Peter Deutsch
#4726
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
L Peter Deutsch is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF interpreter. Deutsch's other work includes the Smalltalk implementation that inspired Java just-in-time compilation technology about 15 years later.
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Robert L. Cook
#8642
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Robert L. Cook is a computer graphics researcher and developer, and the co-creator of the RenderMan rendering software. His contributions are considered to be highly influential in the field of animated arts.
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Madhu Sudan
#8055
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Madhu Sudan is an Indian-American computer scientist. He has been a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 2015. Career He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from IIT Delhi in 1987 and his doctoral degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. He was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York from 1992 to 1997 and moved to MIT after that. From 2009 to 2015 he was a permanent researcher at Microsoft Research ...
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Melvin Conway
#5323
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Melvin Edward Conway is an American computer scientist, computer programmer, and hacker who coined what is now known as Conway's law: "Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." The adage remains relevant in modern software engineering and is still being referenced and investigated.
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Tim Bray
#4546
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers. Previously he has been employed by Google, Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation . Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems.
Go to Profile#489
Moshe Vardi
#6608
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Moshe Ya'akov Vardi is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, United States. and a faculty advisor for the Ken Kennedy Institute. His interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite model theory, knowledge of multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification and reasoning, and teaching logic across the curriculum. He is an expert in model checking, constraint satisfaction and database theory, common knowledge , and theoretical...
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Roberto Ierusalimschy
#6952
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Roberto Ierusalimschy is a Brazilian computer scientist, known for creating the Lua programming language. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro where he has an appointment as a full professor of informatics. He did a post-doc at University of Waterloo in 1992 and was visiting professor at Stanford University in 2012. He is the leading architect and the author of Programming in Lua. He also created LPeg, a Lua library for implementing parsing expression grammars.
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Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh
#8838
Overall Influence
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh is an Iranian British academic who is a professor at University College London. She was awarded a senior research fellowship at the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2022. Early life and education Sadrzadeh is from Iran. She received her undergraduate and master's degrees at Sharif University of Technology. After earning her master's degree Sadrzadeh moved to Canada. She was a doctoral researcher first at the University of Ottawa, where she was awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, a University of Ottawa Excellence Scholarship, and a Canada Female Doctoral Student Award, and then at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
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Tom Knight
#4523
Overall Influence
Tom Knight is a synthetic biologist and computer engineer for his company, Ginkgo Bioworks. He began his studies at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology at the tender age of 14, taking advantage of the school’s close proximity to his home. With a background in computer programming and organic chemistry, he has made a number of important contributions to computer science. His work featured prominently in the creation of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. He wrote the original kernel for ITS operating system and designed one of the earliest semiconductor memory-based bitmap displays.
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Joseph Henry Wegstein
#9184
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Joseph Henry Wegstein was an American computer scientist. Wegstein attended the University of Illinois, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1944, and graduated with a Master of Science in engineering physics in 1948. He worked as Acting Chief of the Office for Information Processing Standards, at the National Bureau of Standards, now National Institute of Standards and Technology , where he specialized in technical standards for automatic data processing, especially in the technology of fingerprint recognition.
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Manuela M. Veloso
#7356
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#495
Thomas Lengauer
#7847
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Thomas Lengauer is a German computer scientist and computational biologist. Education Lengauer studied Mathematics at the Free University of Berlin, earning his Diploma in 1975 and a Dr. rer. nat. in 1976. Lengauer later gained an MSc and a PhD in computer science, both from Stanford University. He received his habilitation degree in computer science at Saarland University in 1984.
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Robert Harper
#9590
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Robert William "Bob" Harper, Jr. is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who works in programming language research. Prior to his position at Carnegie Mellon, Harper was a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#497
Harry Shum
#7639
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Heung-Yeung "Harry" Shum is a Chinese computer scientist. He was a doctoral student of Raj Reddy. He was the Executive Vice President of Artificial Intelligence & Research at Microsoft. He is known for his research on computer vision and computer graphics, and for the development of the search engine Bing.
Go to Profile#498
Frances Yao
#6408
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Frances Foong Chu Yao is a Taiwanese-born American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist. She is currently a Chair Professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences of Tsinghua University. She was Chair Professor and Head of the Department of computer science at the City University of Hong Kong, where she is now an honorary professor.
Go to Profile#499
Lev Manovich
#3691
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Lev Manovich is an artist, an author and a theorist of digital culture. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Manovich played a key role in creating four new research fields: new media studies , software studies , cultural analytics and AI aesthetics . Manovich's current research focuses on generative media, AI culture, digital art, and media theory.
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Derek McAuley
#9447
Overall Influence
Derek Robert McAuley FREng is a British academic who is Professor of Digital Economy in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham and director of Horizon Digital Economy Research, an interdisciplinary research institute funded through the RCUK Digital Economy programme. He acted as a Specialist Advisor to the House of Lords European Union Committee into online platforms, and Chief Innovation Officer during the founding of the Digital Catapult. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and member of the UKCRC, a computing research expert panel of the Institution of ...
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