Professors

Yann LeCun

French-American AI pioneer who invented convolutional neural networks

Born 1959

Brian Kernighan

Canadian computer scientist who co-wrote The C Programming Language and co-created AWK

Born 1942

Margo Seltzer

Computer scientist who co-created Berkeley DB

Manuel Blum

Venezuelan-born computer scientist who co-invented CAPTCHA

Born 1938

Lynn Conway

Computer architect who co-led the VLSI chip-design revolution and championed transgender rights

1938 – 2024

Leslie Valiant

Theorist who created a mathematical foundation for machine learning

Born 1949

Leonard Kleinrock

UCLA scientist whose lab sent the first message over the ARPANET

Born 1934

Leonard Adleman

Co-inventor of RSA encryption and pioneer of DNA computing

Born 1945

Karlheinz Brandenburg

German audio engineer often called the “father of MP3”

Born 1954

Karen Spärck Jones

British computer scientist who invented inverse document frequency, used in search engines

1935 – 2007

Juris Hartmanis

Latvian-born computer scientist who founded computational complexity theory

1928 – 2022

Jürgen Schmidhuber

German AI researcher whose lab co-invented the LSTM neural network

Born 1963

Judea Pearl

AI pioneer who developed Bayesian networks and the science of cause and effect

Born 1936

Joseph Weizenbaum

MIT computer scientist who created ELIZA and became a critic of AI

1923 – 2008

John McCarthy

Computer scientist who coined the term “artificial intelligence” and invented Lisp

1927 – 2011

John Hopfield

Physicist who invented the Hopfield network and won the 2024 Nobel Prize

Born 1933

John Hopcroft

Computer scientist known for fundamental algorithms and a classic textbook

Born 1939

Jeffrey Ullman

Stanford computer scientist and textbook author on compilers, databases and algorithms

Born 1942

Yoshua Bengio

Canadian deep-learning pioneer and one of the “godfathers of AI”

Born 1964

William Kahan

Mathematician known as the father of floating-point arithmetic

Born 1933

Tony Hoare

British computer scientist who invented Quicksort and Hoare logic

1934 – 2026

Terry Winograd

Stanford professor who built SHRDLU and advised Google’s founders

Born 1946

Stuart Russell

Berkeley professor who co-wrote the leading AI textbook and campaigns for safe AI

Steve Furber

Engineer who co-designed the ARM processor and the BBC Micro

Born 1953