Professors

David Silver

British researcher who led AlphaGo and AlphaZero

Daphne Koller

Israeli-American computer scientist who co-founded Coursera and leads insitro

Born 1968

Dana Scott

Logician who gave programming languages a mathematical meaning

Born 1932

Cynthia Breazeal

MIT pioneer of social robots who built Kismet and Jibo

Born 1967

Bob Metcalfe

Inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com

Born 1946

Bjarne Stroustrup

Danish computer scientist who created the C++ programming language

Born 1950

Barbara Liskov

MIT computer scientist known for data abstraction and the Liskov substitution principle

Born 1939

Avi Wigderson

Israeli theorist who showed how randomness and computation relate

Born 1956

Andrew Barto

Co-founder of modern reinforcement learning

Amir Pnueli

Israeli computer scientist who brought temporal logic into computing

1941 – 2009

Allen Newell

AI and cognitive-science pioneer who co-created the first reasoning programs

1927 – 1992

Alfred Aho

Canadian computer scientist, author of the “Dragon Book” and co-creator of AWK

Born 1941

Margo Seltzer

Computer scientist who co-created Berkeley DB

Manuel Blum

Venezuelan-born computer scientist who co-invented CAPTCHA

Born 1938

Karlheinz Brandenburg

German audio engineer often called the “father of MP3”

Born 1954

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 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

Shafi Goldwasser

Cryptographer who co-invented zero-knowledge proofs

Born 1958

Ron Rivest

MIT cryptographer and the “R” in the RSA encryption system

Born 1947

Robert W. Floyd

Computer scientist who pioneered proving that programs are correct

1936 – 2001

Richard E. Stearns

Co-founder of computational complexity theory with Juris Hartmanis

1936 – 2026

Pieter Abbeel

Belgian-American robotics professor and co-founder of Covariant