Marvin Minsky
1927
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2016
(89 years)
Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence , co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.
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Richard Stallman
1953
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Present
(69 years)
Richard Matthew Stallman , also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner, so that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License.
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Yann LeCun
1960
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Present
(62 years)
Areas of Specialization: Artifical Intelligence, Deep Learning Networks
LeCun is one of the most important people in the subfield of computer science known as machine learning. In particular, he is one of the original scientists working on Deep Learning systems, which are enormously popular in work on Artificial Intelligence today. LeCun received his engineering degree from ESIEE Paris in 1983, and his Ph.D. from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 1987. LeCun’s long career has been laser-focused on research on neural networks, actually an old technique in machine learning dating back almost t...
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Donald Knuth
1938
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Present
(84 years)
Areas of Specialization: Computer Programming, Analysis of Algorithms
Knuth is professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech). As an undergraduate at the Case Western Reserve University (then Case Institute of Technology), Knuth received the extraordinary honor of receiving his bachelor of science degree together with a master of science in mathematics based on the strength of his work at Case. He also helped redesign an early IBM computer while at Case, and made fundamental contributions ...
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Geoffrey Hinton
1947
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Present
(75 years)
Areas of Specialization: Artifical Intelligence, Deep Learning
Hinton has been called one of the “Godfathers of Artificial Intelligence” by media sources for his work on a neural network system known as “Deep Learning.” He divides his year between working for Google Brain, the influential AI group at Google, and as a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto in Canada. Hinton, along with researchers David Rumelhart and Ronald Wilson, designed one of the key features in modern neural networks, a type of machine learning algorithm that learns from experience. In 1986, he publi...
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Andrew Ng
1976
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Present
(46 years)
Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a British-born American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and AI. Ng was a co-founder and head of Google Brain and was the former chief scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.
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Alan Kay
1940
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Present
(82 years)
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He is best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. He was awarded the Turing award in 2003.
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Linus Torvalds
1969
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Present
(53 years)
Torvalds is world-famous for designing and developing the open-source Linux operating system. Born in Finland, Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki and received his master’s in Computer Science in 1996. Torvalds academic pursuits were temporarily suspended upon joining the Finnish Army, where he held the rank of Second Lieutenant. After his service, he began conceptualizing a scaled-down version of the massive UNIX operating system, which is still used for computer servers worldwide, and is the basis even for the Android operating system used in smartphones. His brainchild, Linux, came out in 1991 as an open-source alternative to UNIX or Microsoft Windows and MS-DOS.
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Peter Norvig
1956
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Present
(66 years)
Peter Norvig is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is the co-author with Stuart J. Russell of the most popular textbook in the field of AI: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries.
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Jürgen Schmidhuber
1963
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Present
(59 years)
Jürgen Schmidhuber is a computer scientist most noted for his work in the field of artificial intelligence, deep learning and artificial neural networks. He is a co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Lugano, in Ticino in southern Switzerland. Following Google Scholar, from 2016 to 2021 he has received more than 100,000 scientific citations. He has been referred to as "father of modern AI," "father of AI," "dad of mature AI," "Papa" of famous AI products, "Godfather," and "father of deep learning."
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Barbara Liskov
1939
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Present
(83 years)
Liskov (née Barbara Huberman) is a computer scientist at MIT, where she is Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Institute Professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), where she leads the Programming Methodology Group. One of the first women in the US to earn a PhD in computer science, Liskov was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, the eldest of four siblings. In 2008, she won the Turing Award for her invention of the Liskov substitution principle, one of only three women to win that award so far (the other two are Fran Allen and Shafi Goldwasser).
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Bertrand Meyer
1950
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Present
(72 years)
Bertrand Meyer is a French academic, author, and consultant in the field of computer languages. He created the Eiffel programming language and the idea of design by contract.
Education and academic career
Bertrand Meyer received a master's degree in engineering from the École Polytechnique in Paris, a second master's degree from Stanford University, and a PhD from the Université de Nancy. He had a technical and managerial career for nine years at Électricité de France, and for three years was a member of the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Michael I. Jordan
1956
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Present
(66 years)
Michael Irwin Jordan is an American scientist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and researcher in machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence.
Jordan was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010 for contributions to the foundations and applications of machine learning.
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Bjarne Stroustrup
1950
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Present
(72 years)
Stroustrup is currently visiting professor at Columbia University. Stroustrup received his master’s degree in computer science from Aarhus University in Denmark, and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in England. Stroustrup is also a managing director at Morgan Stanley in New York. Stroustrup achieved fame in computer science for his early work developing the C++ programming language. C++ has been widely adopted as an object-oriented language suitable for diverse programming tasks, from financial software to video games engines. With the publication of Stroustrup’s widely adopted textb...
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Niklaus Wirth
1934
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Present
(88 years)
Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science, for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.
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Wil van der Aalst
1966
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Present
(56 years)
Willibrordus Martinus Pancratius van der Aalst is a Dutch computer scientist and full professor at RWTH Aachen University, leading the Process and Data Science group. His research and teaching interests include information systems, workflow management, Petri nets, process mining, specification languages, and simulation. He is also known for his work on workflow patterns.
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Yoshua Bengio
1964
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Present
(58 years)
Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms .
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Tim Berners-Lee
1955
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Present
(67 years)
Areas of Specialization: HTML, Invented World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee (also called “TimBL” or “TBL”) is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee is best known for inventing a markup language, the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) that has (of course) become the basis for Web pages. In a very real sense, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web! And more. In 2016, Berners-Lee received the prestigious Turing Award for “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fund...
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Sebastian Thrun
1967
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Present
(55 years)
Sebastian Thrun is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he founded Google X and Google's self-driving car team. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.
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Stuart J. Russell
1962
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Present
(60 years)
Areas of Specialization: Artificial Intelligence
Stuart J. Russell is the founder of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, adjunct professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco and computer scientist. He earned a B.A. in physics from Wadham College at Oxford and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. He is best known as the co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which is the most popular textbook on the subject. He is an active rese...
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Ken Thompson
1943
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Present
(79 years)
Kenneth Lane Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-developed the Go programming language.
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Brian Kernighan
1942
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Present
(80 years)
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist.
He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan affirmed that he had no part in the design of the C language . He authored many Unix programs, including ditroff. Kernighan is coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The "K" of K&R C and of AWK both stand for "Kernighan".
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Ron Rivest
1947
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Present
(75 years)
Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer and an Institute Professor at MIT. He is a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory . His work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity.
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Ray Kurzweil
1940
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Present
(82 years)
Raymond Kurzweil is an American inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition , text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence , transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
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Scott Aaronson
1981
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Present
(41 years)
Areas of Specialization: Quantum Computing, Complexity Theory
Aaronson is David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, a position he has held since 2016. Before UT, he was a professor of computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist who’s also one of the world’s leading experts in quantum computing, graduated from Cornell University with a degree in computer science (a minor in mathematics). He did his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. Aaronson is known for his work on q...
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Fei-Fei Li
1975
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Present
(47 years)
Fei-Fei Li is an American computer scientist. She is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Li is a Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and a Co-Director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.
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Edwin Catmull
1945
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Present
(77 years)
Edwin Earl "Ed" Catmull is an American computer scientist who is the co-founder of Pixar and was the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, including the 2019 ACM Turing Award.
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Bill Joy
1954
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Present
(68 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.
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Chris Lattner
1978
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Present
(44 years)
Chris Lattner is an American software engineer best known as the main author of LLVM and related projects such as the Clang compiler and the Swift programming language. As of January 21, 2022, he is the CEO at Modular AI, a artificial intelligence company he co-founded. Before founding Modular AI, he was working at SiFive as Senior Vice President of Platform Engineering, after two years at Google Brain. Prior to that, he briefly served as Vice President of Autopilot Software at Tesla, Inc. and worked at Apple Inc. as Senior Director of the Developer Tools department, leading the Xcode, Instr...
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Dennis Ritchie
1941
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2011
(70 years)
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist. He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the "R" in K&R C, and commonly known by his username dmr.
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Seymour Papert
1928
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2016
(88 years)
Seymour Aubrey Papert was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, and of the constructionist movement in education. He was co-inventor, with Wally Feurzeig and Cynthia Solomon, of the Logo programming language.
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Shafi Goldwasser
1958
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Present
(64 years)
Areas of Specialization: Computational Complexity Theory, Cryptography, Number Theory
Shafrira “Shafi” Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University, and a master’s and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Goldwasser’s impressive career spans many areas in computer science, including computational complexity theory, cryptography, and number theory.
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Rodney Brooks
1959
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Present
(63 years)
Rodney Allen Brooks is an Australian roboticist, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics. He was a Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Rethink Robotics and currently is the co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Robust.AI .
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Demis Hassabis
1976
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Present
(46 years)
Demis Hassabis is a British artificial intelligence researcher, neuroscientist, video game designer, entrepreneur, and five times winner of the Pentamind board games championship. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Advisor since 2018.
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Grady Booch
1955
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Present
(67 years)
Grady Booch is an American software engineer, best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. He is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software architecture, software engineering, and collaborative development environments.
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Peter Chen
1947
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Present
(75 years)
Peter Pin-Shan Chen is a Taiwanese American computer scientist. He is a distinguished career scientist and faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and Professor Emeritus at LSU. He is known for the development of the entity–relationship model in 1976.
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Bruce Schneier
1963
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Present
(59 years)
Areas of Specialization: Computer Security
Schneier’s name is synonymous with computer security. He is also respected as a cryptographer, and writes on issues of personal privacy arising from society’s ever changing relationship with new technology. In 1984, Schneier earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Rochester in New York. He received a master’s degree in computer science from American University in Washington, D.C. in 1988 and an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Westminster, London in 2011. Over the years, Schneier has written extensively on core issues and p...
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Christos Papadimitriou
1949
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Present
(73 years)
Christos Harilaos Papadimitriou is a Greek theoretical computer scientist and the Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University.
Education
Papadimitriou studied at the National Technical University of Athens, where in 1972 he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in electrical engineering. He then pursued graduate studies at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1976 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "The complexity of combinatorial optimization problems."
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Eliezer Yudkowsky
1979
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Present
(43 years)
Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky is an American decision theorist and artificial intelligence theorist and writer best known for popularizing the idea of friendly artificial intelligence. He is a co-founder and research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute , a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion was an influence on Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
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Tony Hoare
1934
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Present
(88 years)
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and concurrent computing. His work earned him the Turing Award, usually regarded as the highest distinction in computer science, in 1980.
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John McCarthy
1927
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2011
(84 years)
John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. McCarthy was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He co-authored the document that coined the term "artificial intelligence" , developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized time-sharing, and invented garbage collection.
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Adi Shamir
1952
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Present
(70 years)
Areas of Specialization: Computational Cryptography
Shamir is a cryptographer and professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He received a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1973, and a master’s and Ph.D. in computer science at Weizmann in the 1975 and 1977. Shamir became famous for his co-invention of one of the world’s first public key cryptosytems, RSA (which bears his name: it’s an acronym for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman). The RSA public key system has been widely adopted by businesses and individuals to securely send encrypted messages, as in email or other data transmissions over a network.
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Daphne Koller
1968
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Present
(54 years)
Areas of Specialization: Machine Learning, Artifical Intelligence, Computational Biology
Koller is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. She received her bachelor’s degree from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1985, and her Ph.D. from Stanford in 1993. Her former students include notable computer scientists Ben Tasker, Suchi Saria, and Eran Segal. Koller’s work focuses on probabilistic reasoning, representation, and inference with graphical models like Bayes Nets. With Stanford colleague Andrew Ng, Koller launched the online learning platform Coursera in 2012, serving as co-CEO with Ng and later as the company’s president.
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Constantinos Daskalakis
1981
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Present
(41 years)
Constantinos Daskalakis is a Greek theoretical computer scientist. He is a professor at MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize and the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2018.
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Jeffrey Ullman
1942
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Present
(80 years)
Ullman is Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He received a bachelor’s degree in engineering mathematics from Columbia University in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1968. In addition to his academic appointment at Stanford, Ullman has worked for Bell Labs and has been a professor of computer science at Princeton. Ullman is known as one of the world’s top database experts. He has also made substantial contributions to a field known as data mining, where statistical algorithms extract usable patterns from large collections of (typically) unstructured data.
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Fred Brooks
1931
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Present
(91 years)
Frederick Phillips "Fred" Brooks Jr. is an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month.
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Andrew S. Tanenbaum
1944
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Present
(78 years)
Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum , sometimes referred to by the handle ast, is an American-Dutch computer scientist and professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
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Randy Pausch
1960
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2008
(48 years)
Randolph Frederick Pausch was an American educator, a professor of computer science, human–computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Pausch learned he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006. In August 2007, he was given a terminal diagnosis: "3 to 6 months of good health left". He gave an upbeat lecture titled "The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" on September 18, 2007, at Carnegie Mellon, which became a popular YouTube video and led to other media appearances. He then co-authored a book called The Last Lecture on the sa...
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Judea Pearl
1936
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Present
(86 years)
Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks . He is also credited for developing a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models . In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded Pearl with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning". He is the author of sev...
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Daniel J. Bernstein
1971
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Present
(51 years)
Daniel Julius Bernstein is an American German mathematician, cryptologist, and computer scientist. He is a visiting professor at CASA at Ruhr University Bochum, as well as a Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before this, he was a professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
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