Makers. Philosophers. Visionaries.
A collection of individuals, from yesterday and today, whose talent, imagination, and determination is shaping our future.
Fran Allen
Computer Scientist
Ms. Allen is a pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, code optimization, and parallelization. In the early 1980s, she formed the Parallel TRANslation (PTRAN) group to study the issues involved in compiling for parallel machines. The group was considered one of the top research groups in the world working with parallelization issues. Her work on these projects culminated in algorithms and technologies that form the basis for the theory of program optimization and are widely used in today’s commercial compilers throughout the industry.
Ms. Allen’s influence on the IBM community was recognized by her appointment as an IBM fellow, the first woman to receive this recognition. She was also president of the IBM Academy of Technology. The Academy plays an important role in the corporation by providing technical leadership, advancing the understanding of key technical areas and fostering communications among technical professionals.
Rama Akkiraju
Engineer, Computer Scientist, MBA
Very few earn the title of “Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor” at IBM, but Rama Akkiraju’s contributions warrant the distinction. She leads the mission of “People Insights” at IBM Watson and develops technologies that infer personalities, emotions, tone, attitudes, and intentions from social media data using linguistic and machine learning techniques. Akkiraju helmed the teams responsible for many of Watson cognitive services, including Tone Analyzer.
To tackle this challenging space, Akkiraju’s teams leverage multiple disciplines including AI, psychology, sociology, decision theory and consumer behavior. “Bots that really understand people can bridge the shortage of customer support agents, guidance counselors, and health coaches,” she points out. “These are all areas where our work can make a meaningful difference in people’s everyday lives.”
Kay Antonelli
Computer Programmer
Throughout her degree she joined every maths class that the college were offering including spherical trigonometry, differential calculus, projective geometry, partial differential equations, and statistics. Within weeks of graduation she had secured a post with the U.S. Civil Service at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania. Her job involved computing ballistics trajectories used for artillery firing tables, central to the American war effort and Kay became prominent in her role.
After a few months, she moved to work on the differential analyzer in the basement of the Moore School, the largest and most sophisticated analog mechanical calculator of the time. Kay was quickly promoted to working on, and then supervising, calculations on the Differential Analyzer. With the invention of ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), these computations went from taking 40 hours (by hand), to an hour (by Analyzer), to just mere seconds (by ENIAC). Kay was recruited into the initial programming team. With no prior training and only schematics to work with, an all-woman team programmed the ENIAC.
Kay was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground’s Ballistics Research Laboratory along with the ENIAC when it was moved there in mid-1947. In 1948 she married ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly and together they had five children. After WWII, she assisted some of the world’s leading mathematicians on using the ENIAC, and helped instruct the next generation of computer programmers. She later also worked on the software design for newer computers including the BINAC and UNIVAC I, whose hardware was designed by her husband.
Jean Bartik
Mathematician, Computer
Bartik was one of six human computers chosen to work on the new machine, called ENIAC — considered to be the first digital computer. She and the team taught themselves ENIAC’s operation and became its (and, arguably, the world’s) first programmers. She helped adapt it to use software programs stored in memory.
Gertrude Blanche
Mathematician
When the global Great Depression took hold, the Work Progress Administration was launched as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Gertrude Blanche was put in charge of the Mathematical Tables Project, the predecessor to today’s Handbook of Mathematical Functions. This was a work relief project that employed hundreds of out-of-work mathematicians and computers (again, mostly women). Blanche’s work developed best practices for human computing that were extremely sophisticated, including mechanisms for error checking, which influenced the way early punched card computing evolved. In 1941, W. J. Eckert published Punched Card Methods in Scientific Computing which turned out to be, in a manner of speaking, the first computing methodology or pattern language.*
Written by Grady Booch, IEEE 2018 vol.35
Nick Bostrom
Philosopher
Swedish philosopher who heads the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, superintelligence risks, and the reversal test.
Cynthia Breazeal
Philospohy Ph.D., Computer Scientist, Roboticist
A world renowned pioneer in social robotics, Cynthia Breazeal splits her time as an Associate Professor at MIT, where she received her PhD and founded the Personal Robots Group, and Founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, a personal robotics company with over $85 million in funding.
“I wanted to create robots with social and emotional intelligence that could work in collaborative partnership with people. In 2–5 years, I see social robots helping families with things that really matter, like education, health, eldercare, entertainment, and companionship.”
Joanna Bryson
Joanna Bryson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing at the University of Bath. She works on Artificial Intelligence, ethics and collaborative cognition. In 2010 Bryson published Robots Should Be Slaves, which selected as a chapter in Yorick Wilks’ “Close Engagements with Artificial Companions: Key Social, Psychological, Ethical and Design Issues”. She helped the EPSRC to define the Principles of Robotics in 2010. In 2015 she was a Visiting Academic at the University of Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, where she still remains as an affiliate. She is focussed on “Standardizing Ethical Design for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems”.
In 2017 she won an Outstanding Achievement award from Cognition X. She regularly appears in national media, talking about human-robot relationships and the ethics of AI.
Jeff Dean
Computer Scientist, Software Engineer
Programmer Jeff Dean was one of Google’s earliest employees, and he is credited with helping to create some of the fundamental technologies that powered the tech giant’s rise in the early 2000s. Dean is also something of a legend among Googlers, and over the years has even inspired a joke format (similar to Chuck Norris facts) that emphasizes his coding prowess. For example, did you know that Jeff Dean’s PIN is the last four digits of Pi, or that Jeff Dean’s keyboard only has two keys, “0” and “1”? Now they just need to come up with some Jeff Dean AI jokes. He is currently the lead of Google.ai, Google’s AI division.
J. Presper Eckert
Electrical Engineer
J. Presper Eckert Jr. and his professor John W. Mauchly made the first general purpose digital computer, dubbed ENIAC — Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. Prototypes BINAC and UNIVAC I followed as a hardware firm, as well. The recipient of dozens of patents and the 1968 National Medal of Science.
Douglas Engelbart
Engineer, Inventor
Inventions included the mouse, the graphical user interface, the concept of cloud computing, the concept of agile, the concept of cognitive computing platforms, and won the 1997 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, for his “inspiring vision of the future of interactive computing and the invention of key technologies to help realize this vision.”
Ayse Naz Erkan
Data Scientist
Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, Ayse Naz Erkan moved to the US in 2004 for a PhD in Computer Science at the Courant Institute of NYU. She researched deep learning applications for off-road autonomous robot navigation in Yann LeCun’s lab and studied semi-supervised learning at the Max Planck Institute For Biological Cybernetics before joining a tech startup as an early engineer.
Erkan describes her startup days as “incredibly life-changing”, transforming her into a better problem solver and pragmatic technologist. She now leads the Content Understanding and Applied Deep Learning team at Twitter, which acquired the company 5.5 years ago, and has worked to make the social network a safer place.
“Working on hate speech and abuse with Twitter data was quite exciting,” reflects Erkan, “Especially witnessing first-hand how machine learning is impacting public communication design.”
Edward Feigenbaum
Computer Scientist
A pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and is often known as “the father of expert systems.” He founded the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University and is currently a professor emeritus of computer science there.
Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler
Information Scientist
Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler joined Stanford Research Institute (SRI International) in 1960 as an information scientist heading up the Information Research Department, later becoming a member of Dr. Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center where she began her work on the Internet. She pioneered and managed first the ARPNET, and then the Defense Data Network (DDN) network information centers (NIC) under contract to the Department of Defense (DoD). Both of these early networks were the forerunners of today’s Internet.
While serving as Principal Investigator for the NIC project and Director for the Network Information Systems Center at SRI, Ms. Feinler’s group developed the first Internet “yellow-” and “white-page” servers as well as the first query-based network host name and address (WHOIS) server. Her group also managed the Host Naming Registry for the Internet, developing the top-level domain-naming scheme of .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org, and .net, which are still in use today. The NIC also researched and managed parts of the first Internet audit trail and billing system for the DDN, and developed an early model for today’s email systems.
After leaving SRI, Jake helped he NASA Ames Research Center in bringing networking to the large NSF and NASA telescope sites. She also was active in setting up the NASA Science Internet and Globe NICs, and assisted with guidelines for developing and managing the NASA World Wide Web. She was appointed Delegate at Large to the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Centers; was a founding member of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF); was inducted into the SRI Alumni Hall of Fame in 2000, the Internet Society Internet Hall of Fame in 2012, and the Women In Technology Hall of Fame in 2018.
Andrea Frome
Environmental Scientist, Computer Scientist
Originally an environmental scientist, she fell in love with the data and modeling aspects of her work, which inspired her to switch gears and pursue a PhD in Computer Vision and Machine Learning at Berkeley. She then joined Google, where she published seminal research papers on multi-modal visual classification systems and launched Google Street View.
Frome is currently Director of Research at Clarifai, a leading computer vision company. Her ultimate goal is to enable computers to understand visual input the way humans do and make accurate predictions about the world around them.
Carolina Galleguillos
Machine Learning Engineer
Carolina Galleguillos was born in Santiago, Chile. After graduating with honors and an Engineering and Computer Science degree from University of Chile, she won a government scholarship for a Silicon Valley internship which eventually led her to complete her PhD in Computer Science at UCSD. Throughout her academic career, she published research at major computer vision conferences and was awarded IGERT NSF fellowships in 2007 and 2008.
Galleguillos has developed computer vision and machine learning algorithms for giants like Google, Hewlett-Packard, Honda, and Thumbtack, but she’s particularly proud of the scrappy AI team she built and trained at SET Media. Despite very limited resources, her group shipped production machine learning systems that were critical to the company’s acquisition by Conversant in 2014.
Margaret Hamilton
Computer Scientist, Systems Engineer
It might come as a surprise to most of today’s software engineers to learn that the founder of their discipline is a woman. Margaret Hamilton, renowned mathematician and computer science pioneer, is credited with having coined the term software engineering while developing the guidance and navigation system for the Apollo spacecraft as head of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory.
Hamilton explains why she chose to call it software engineering:
“I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it — and those building it — would be given its due respect and thus I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process. When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.”
She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design.
Hamilton has published over 130 papers, proceedings, and reports about the 60 projects and six major programs in which she has been involved. On November 22, 2016, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President Barack Obama for her work leading the development of on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Moon missions.
Demis Hassabis
Artificial Intelligence Researcher, Neuroscientist, Video Game Designer, World-class Games Player, Co-founder of DeepMind
A former child chess prodigy who finished his A-levels two years early before coding the multi-million selling simulation game, Theme Park, aged 17. Following graduation from Cambridge University with a Double First in Computer Science, he founded the pioneering video games company Elixir Studios, producing award winning games for global publishers such as Vivendi Universal.
After a decade of experience leading successful technology startups, Demis returned to academia to complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL, followed by postdocs at MIT and Harvard, before founding DeepMind. His research into the neural mechanisms underlying imagination and planning was listed in the top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2007 by the journal Science. Demis is a 5-times World Games Champion, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and the recipient of the Royal Society’s Mullard Award and the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Silver Medal.
Geoffrey E. Hinton
Cognitive Psychologist, Computer Scientist
One of the most famous researchers of artificial intelligence, and a major contributor to the idea of deep learning and deep neural networks, Hinton divides his time between the University of Toronto and Google Brain.
Elizabeth “Betty” Holberton (Snyder)
Engineer
Betty was one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, and was the inventor of breakpoints in computer debugging.
During the Second World War, when men were fighting in the war, the US army was hiring women to calculate ballistic trajectories. Betty Snyder was chosen by the Moore School of Engineering and soon by the ENIAC along with Ruth Teitelbaum, Marlyn Meltzer and others as a ‘computer’. The Moore School at UPenn was funded by the US Army during the Second World War. Here a group of about 80 women worked manually calculating ballistic trajectories — complex differential calculations. These women were called ‘computers’. In 1945, the Army decided to fund an experimental project — the first all-electronic digital computer and six of the women ‘computers’ were selected to be its first programmers. Among these six was Betty Holberton.
The ENIAC was the first all-electronic digital computer, a huge machine of forty black 8-foot panels. The programmers had none of the programming tools of today and it was a challenge to make the ENIAC work. The six programmers had to physically conduct the ballistic program using 3000 switches and dozens of switches and digital trays to route the data and program pulses through the machine. They used analog technology to calculate ballistic trajectory equations. Initially the ENIAC was classified. In 1946, the ENIAC computer was unveiled before the public and the press. The six women were the only generation of programmers to program the ENIAC.
After the war, Holberton worked at Remington Rand on the first two revisions of the FORTRAN language standard — FORTRAN77 and FORTRAN90. In 1959, she was the Chief of the Programming Research Branch, Applied Mathematics Laboratory at the David Taylor Model Basin, one of the largest ship model basins test facilities in the world. Holberton also worked for the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation on the BINAC, the first commercial digital computer in the world and on the UNIVAC, a line of electronic digital stored-program computers. Holberton also wrote the first statistical analysis package used for the 1950 US census.
In the last few years of her life, Holberton received recognition as a computer pioneer. In 1997, along with the six other original ENIAC programmers, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. She was, however, the only one out of the six ENIAC programmers to receive the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, the highest award given by the Association of Women in computing. In 1997 again, she received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society.
Admiral Grace Hopper
Mathematician, Computer Scientist, Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy
Born in 1906, she studied math and physics at Vassar and then Yale, earning a PhD in mathematics in 1931. She taught math at Vassar for the following decade before joining the U.S. Navy, as part of an all-female division put together in 1942 during the Second World War, where she helped program the new Mark I computer at Harvard. After that, she was hooked on computing.
Hopper led the team that developed the first working code compiler (the A-0 system), which led to the creation of COBOL — one of the most important programming languages of the 20th century.
Perhaps most importantly, she believed that programming languages should be as easy to understand as the English language — hence, her work on the compiler, which transformed source code from high-level computer language that could be written by a human into a low-level language that a computer could process. But, back in the day, that view wasn’t exactly popular among her peers.
Hopper also coined the word ‘bug.’ In the 1940s, her team was working on a computer glitch, only to discover the problem was a bug — a live bug, that is: a moth stuck in an electrical switch. Hence, they ‘debugged’ the first computer.
Hopper was not only a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist; she was also a gifted teacher and communicator. She organized myriad workshops and conferences to promote the understanding of computers and programming. In her remarks upon accepting the National Medal of Technology, Hopper said, “If you ask me what accomplishment I’m most proud of, the answer would be all the young people I’ve trained over the years; that’s more important than writing the first compiler.”
Hopper received the ‘Man of the Year’ award in 1969 from the Data Processing Management Association. Nicknamed “Amazing Grace” by her subordinates, Hopper remained on active duty for nineteen years. She retired from the Navy as a rear admiral at the age of 79 — the oldest serving officer in the U.S. armed forces.
Michael Jordan
Mathematician, Computer Scientist
A professor at University of California, Irvine, Jordan popularized the use of Bayesian networks in machine learning and has done a lot of work on the links with statistics. A tool that analyzes published papers found that he was the most influential computer scientist in the field (in fact, he has collaborated with Andrew Ng in the past).
Rana el Kaliouby
Computer Scientist
Rana el Kaliouby defined the field of “emotion AI” and co-founded Affectiva, where she leads as CEO. Affectiva’s technology has proven transformative for industries like automotive, market research, robotics, education, and gaming, but also for use cases like teaching autistic children emotion recognition and nonverbal social cues. One mother broke down in tears when her child, using Affectiva-powered Google Glasses, learned to make true eye contact with her for the first time.
“3–5 years from now, our devices will be emotion-aware,” predicts el Kaliouby. “You won’t remember what it was like when your technology didn’t recognize when you are sad or angry.”
John Kelly
Computer Scientist
Used an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech, an event among the most prominent in the history of Bell Labs. Kelly’s voice recorder synthesizer — Vocoder — recreated the song “Daisy Bell”. He is best known for formulating the Kelly criterion, a formula to determine what proportion of wealth to risk in a sequence of positive expected value bets to maximize the rate of return.
Dag Kittlaus
Economist, Marketer, AI Entrepreneur
Kittlaus is well known as the person in charge of the teams that developed Siri and Viv. He worked at Motorola Mobility as a general manager until 2007, and went on to create a startup called Siri later that year, where he was the co-founder and CEO. Translated from Norwegian, “Siri” means “beautiful victorious counselor,” and it was the first true automated personal assistant for mobile devices. After a phone call from Steve Jobs, Apple acquired Siri in 2010 and Kittlaus started working at Apple as a director at iPhone Apps. After 18 months at Apple, Kittlaus quit his job and created a new startup — Viv. The company was acquired by Samsung on October 5th, 2016 and Viv is expected to launch on the Samsung Galaxy S8, the company’s flagship smartphone. Viv is Samsung’s answer to Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant.
Recently, during a routine executive medical exam, Kittlaus was diagnosed with pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer, ironically the exact same rare cancer that afflicted Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Kittlaus has undergone successful surgery, and one of the nurses who helped him recover was named Siri. After recuperating, Kittlaus is back at work at Samsung, running Viv.
Daphne Koller
Computer Scientist
Co-found of Coursera, the world’s largest online education platform, and now serves as Chief Computing Officer at Calico Labs, an Alphabet (Google) R&D company studying the biology of aging and developing interventions for longer and healthier lives.
Raymond Kurzweil
Computer Scientist
Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” He is considered one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions.
Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
Kurzweil is the recipient of the acclaimed MIT Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.
He has received 20 honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has authored 7 books, 5 of which have been national bestsellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in science.
Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near, was a New York Times best seller. His latest New York Times best seller is How to Create a Mind: The secret of human thought revealed.
Yann LeCun
Computer Scientist
LeCun is a computer scientist with interests in the fields of machine learning, mobile robotics, and computer vision. In 1988, after a postdoc in Toronto, LeCun started working at the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, where he developed a biologically inspired model of image recognition called Convolutional Neural Networks, and applied it to OCR. He moved to AT&T Labs-Research in 1996 as head of the Image Processing Department, and worked on the DjVu image compression technology. In 2003, LeCun joined the New York University as a Silver Professor of computer science neural science. He became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science, and since December 2013, he is the Director of AI Research at Facebook.
Fei-Fei Li
Physicist
A renowned academic in computer vision, Li recently joined Google Cloud as Chief Scientist of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning to advance her mission of “democratizing AI”. She continues to act as an Associate Professor at Stanford, where she directs both the Stanford AI Lab and Stanford Vision Lab. Since obtaining a B.A. in Physics from Princeton and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Caltech, Li has published over 150 scientific papers in top-tier journals and conferences and built ImageNet, a 15 million image dataset that contributed to the latest developments in deep learning and AI.
Angelica Lim
Roboticist
10 years ago, way before deep learning was cool, Angelica Lim used Yann LeCun’s convolutional neural networks to break Hotmail’s CAPTCHA system. She even did it in the recursive programming language LISP, but never published her results since neural networks weren’t in vogue then.
During her masters and PhD at Kyoto University, Lim combined computer science with neuroscience and cultural development psychology to build a robot that “feels”. As a pioneer in “developmental robotics”, which models human-style learning in machines, Lim explains that toddlers link names of emotions to specific sets of physiological and psychological states as well as physical expressions. Learning for both humans and robots is heavily influenced by caregivers and culture.
Lim is currently a Robotics Software Development Manager in R&D at Softbank Robotics, creators of the humanoid robot Pepper.
Douglas Lenat
Researcher
The CEO of Cycorp, Inc., and a prominent researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He has worked on machine learning (with his AM and Eurisko programs), knowledge representation, blackboard systems, and “ontological engineering” with his Cyc program, the longest running AI project in history. He has also worked in military simulations and published a critique of conventional random-mutation Darwinism based on his experience with Eurisko. Lenat was one of the original Fellows of the AAAI.
John Mauchly
Physicist
An American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States.
Together they started the first computer company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and pioneered fundamental computer concepts including the stored program, subroutines, and programming languages. Their work, as exposed in the widely read First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945) and as taught in the Moore School Lectures (1946), influenced an explosion of computer development in the late 1940s all over the world.
John McCarthy
Computer Scientist, Cognitive Scientist
He coined the term “artificial intelligence” (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized timesharing, and was very influential in the early development of AI.
George Miller
Cognitive Psychologist
One of the founders of the cognitive psychology field. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics and cognitive science in general.
“My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer.” So began perhaps the most famous paper in the history of experimental psychology. The Harvard psychologist George Miller, inspired by information theory, aimed to measure the “channel capacity” of the mind, and found that three very different tasks pointed to the same answer. People could associate about seven different labels with continuous stimuli (like loudnesses or colors); they could rapidly identify the number dots without counting them up to around seven; and they could hold about seven items in immediate memory. And there was an additional twist. The capacity of immediate memory was the same whether each item was a binary digit (1 bit), a decimal digit (3.3 bits), a letter of the alphabet (4.7 bits), or an English word chosen from a list of a thousand (10 bits). This elasticity suggests that people don’t just passively transmit incoming information but recode it into mind-friendly units, which Miller called “chunks.” Human information processing is thus constricted by a bottleneck of 7 plus or minus 2 chunks. With this remarkable insight, George Miller helped to launch the cognitive revolution (pdf), ushering in a new era of theory and research in American psychology.
Marvin Minsky
Cognitive 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.
Allen Newell
Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology Researcher
A researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AIprograms, the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957) (with Herbert A. Simon). He was awarded the ACM’s A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert A. Simon in 1975 for their basic contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.
Andrew Ng
Computer Scientist
A Chinese English computer scientist and entrepreneur, Ng co-founded and led Google Brain and was a former VP & Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company’s Artificial Intelligence Group into several thousand people. He is an adjunct professor (formerly associate professor and Director of the AI Lab) at Stanford University. Ng is also an early pioneer in online learning — which led to the co-founding of Coursera.
Devi Parikh
Computer Engineer
Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech and a Visiting Researcher at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). After receiving her masters and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, she’s held multiple visiting positions at top research labs and won accolades such as the 2017 IJCAI Computers and Thought award, considered “the premier award for AI researchers under the age of 35”.
Parikh’s most proud of her research work in Visual Question Answering (VQA) which lies at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing (NLP). “Through making our large datasets and systems publicly available, we’ve enabled research groups around the world to make significant progress on building machines that can automatically answer questions about visual content,” she highlights. Such technology can aid the visually impaired and transmit information on low-bandwidth networks that can’t support images.
Carol Reiley
Computer Scientist, Roboticist, Entrepreneur
Co-Founder and President of Drive.ai, which formed out of Stanford University’s AI Lab and builds deep learning software for self-driving cars. Despite competition from deep-pocketed tech giants and auto industry skepticism, Reiley and her team raised a $12M Series A, grew the company to 60+, and released several autonomous vehicles on the road.
Gene Roddenberry
Television Screenwriter, Producer
Best remembered for creating the original Star Trek television series, Roddenbery was the first TV writer with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and he was later inducted by both the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Years after his death, Roddenberry was one of the first humans to have his ashes carried into earth orbit. The popularity of the Star Trek universe and films has inspired films, books, comic books, video games, and fan films set in the Star Trek universe.
Frank Rosenblatt
Psychologist specializing in Artificial Intelligence
An originator of perception theory, he developed an experimental machine, Perceptron, that could be trained to identify automatically objects or patterns such as letters of the alphabet constructed on biological principles that showed an ability to learn. The instrument was an electromechanical device consisting of a sensory unit of photo cells that viewed the pat tern shown to the machine, association units that contained the machine’s memory and response units that displayed visually its pattern‐recognition response. He developed the concept in a book, “Principles of Neurodynamics,” and gave a course in brain mechanisms and models.
Daniela Rus
Computer Scientist, Roboticist
Daniela Rus is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, Director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and head of CSAIL’s Distributed Robotics Lab. She previously founded the Dartmouth Robotics Lab and is known for her pioneering work in self-reconfiguring robots which adapt to different environments by changing their internal structure.
“Our recent 3D-printed soft robots are safer, cheaper and more resilient than hard-bodied robots created through traditional manufacturing,” she explains. The agile structures of soft robots enable them to easily change direction and squeeze into tight spots. Being able to 3D print them also democratizes manufacturing.
Stuart J Russell
Computer Scientist
Stuart is a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he founded the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. He and Peter Norvig authored Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, a book used by over 1,300 universities in 116 countries. It’s widely considered an industry-standard resource in the AI field.
Arthur Lee Samuel
Electrical Engineer
An American pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence, he coined the term “machine learning” in 1959. His Samuel Checkers-playing Program was among the world’s first successful self-learning programs, and as such a very early demonstration of the fundamental concept of artificial intelligence.
Before World War II, at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he was a leading designer of microwave tubes, of which his TR radar switch, the Samuel tube, was the most widely used. At the University of Illinois he launched the ILLIAC team. He was one of those who guided IBM into computers and into real research, and he initiated its solid-state laboratory. He made a major improvement in the Williams storage tube. He invented hashing. He was chairman of the Defense Department Advisory Group on Electron Devices for 18 years. He started IBMs Zurich Laboratory and was instrumental in founding the IBM Journal of Research and Development.
He was also a senior member in the TeX community who devoted much time giving personal attention to the needs of users and wrote an early TeX manual in 1983.
Jurgen Schmidhuber
Computer Scientist
As Jurgen is a computer scientist specializing in the field of AI, neural networks, and self-improving AI, he has been called the father of modern artificial intelligence.
He taught at Technische Universitat Munchen in Munich, Germany from 2004 until 2009 as head of the cognitive robotics lab, when he became a professor of artificial intelligence at the Universita della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland.
In 1997 Schmidhuber and Sepp Hochreiter published a paper discussing a type of recurrent neural network they called long short-term memory (LSTM). This publication was used in 2015 in a new implementation of Google’s speech recognition software for smartphones.
Schmidhuber founded a company called Nnaisense in 2014, with the goal of working on commercial applications of AI in finance and self driving cars.
Oliver Selfridge
Mathematician
Oliver Selfridge is known as the “father of machine perception” for his work as a pioneer of computing and as a researcher into artificial intelligence. Though London-born, he did his most significant work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and was among the organizers of the Dartmouth Conference of 1956 at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. The first public meeting on artificial intelligence (AI), it introduced the term into general use.
His ideas on how humans learn, and how researchers could replicate this process with computers, profoundly affected the AI field. In fact, if you’re working in machine learning, neural networks, other soft-computing approaches, or agent-based computing, then whether you are aware or not, you owe a significant intellectual debt to Oliver. His seminal ideas in these and related areas helped define the nature of our work.
David Silver
Computer Scientist
Professor David Silver leads the reinforcement learning research group at DeepMind and was lead researcher on AlphaGo.He graduated from Cambridge University in 1997 with the Addison-Wesley award, and befriended Demis Hassabis whilst there. Subsequently, David co-founded the video games company Elixir Studios, where he was CTO and lead programmer, receiving several awards for technology and innovation.
David was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2011, and subsequently became a lecturer at University College London, where he is now a professor.
His recent work has focused on combining reinforcement learning with deep learning, including a program that learns to play Atari games directly from pixels. David led the AlphaGo project, culminating in the first program to defeat a top professional player in the full-size game of Go. AlphaGo subsequently received an honorary 9 Dan Professional Certification; and won the Cannes Lion award for innovation. He then led development of AlphaZero, which used the same AI to learn to play Go from scratch (learning only by playing itself and not from human games) before learning to play chess and shogi in the same way, to higher levels than any other computer program.
Herbert Simon
Social Scientist
American social scientist known for his contributions to a number of fields, including psychology, mathematics, statistics, and operations research, all of which he synthesized in a key theory that earned him the 1978 Nobel Prize for Economics. Simon and his longtime collaborator Allen Newell won the 1975 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, for their “basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing.”
He is best known for his work on the theory of corporate decision making known as “behaviourism.” In his influential book Administrative Behavior (1947), Simon sought to replace the highly simplified classical approach to economic modeling — based on a concept of the single decision-making, profit-maximizing entrepreneur — with an approach that recognized multiple factors that contribute to decision making.
Later in his career, Simon pursued means of creating artificial intelligence through computer technology. He wrote several books on computers, economics, and management, and in 1986 he won the U.S. National Medal of Science.
Ray Solomonoff
Physicist
Ray Solomonoff is the inventor of algorithmic probability, the General Theory of Inductive Inference (also known as Universal Inductive Inference), and was a founder of algorithmic information theory. He was an originator of the branch of artificial intelligence based on machine learning, prediction and probability. He circulated the first report on non-semantic machine learning in 1956.
Solomonoff was one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence as a field and Machine Learning as a discipline within it. It must be noted that he was one of the few attendees at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, basically an extended brain storming session that started AI formally as a field.
Although he is best known for algorithmic probability and his general theory of inductive inference, he made many other important discoveries throughout his life, most of them directed toward his goal in artificial intelligence: to develop a machine that could solve hard problems using probabilistic methods.
Frances Spence
Computer Programmer
One of the original programmers for the ENIAC (the first digital computer). She is considered one of the first computer programmers in history.
While its hardware was primarily built by a team of men,[3] its computational development was led by a team of six programmers (called Computers), all women from similar backgrounds as Frances.
Spence and eighy other women were originally hired by the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering to create the ENIAC, which was needed to compute ballistics trajectories. The Moore School was funded by the US Army, and at the time they were hiring female programmers in particular due to the fact that many young American men were fighting overseas in World War II. Bilas and her Chestnut Hill College classmate Kathleen Antonelli were part of a smaller team within the ENIAC team. In addition to their larger programming duties, they were also assigned to the operation of an analog computing machine known as a Differential Analyzer, which was used to calculate ballistics equations (something which all the women on the ENIAC team were proficient at doing by hand). When the War ended, both Frances and Kathleen continued working with the ENIAC and they collaborated with other leading mathematicians.
In 1997, Frances was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame,[6] along with the other original ENIAC programmers. Their work paved the way for the electronic computers of the future, and their innovation kick-started the rise of electronic computing and computer programming in the Post-World War II era.
Peter Stone
Computer Scientist
A major player in the robotic soccer world, Peter Stone is the chair of the Robotics Portfolio Program at the University of Texas. His research focuses on creating robust autonomous agents that can interact with other intelligent agents in varied situations.
He is the founder and director of the Learning Agents Research Group (LARG) within the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, as well as associate department chair and chair of the University’s Robotics Portfolio Program.
He is also the President, COO, and co-founder of Cogitai, Inc.
Richard Sutton
Psychologist, Computer Scientist
Sutton is considered as one of the founding fathers of modern computational reinforcement learning, with several contributions to the field, like temporal difference learning and policy gradient methods.
He is a Distinguished Research Scientist with Google Deep Mind where his research focuses on learning problems facing a decision-maker interacting with its environment.
Latanya Sweeney
Computer Scientist
As a Professor of Government and Technology at Harvard and Director of Harvard’s Data Privacy Lab, Latanya Sweeney tackles challenges of security, privacy, and bias in personal data and machine learning algorithms.
Sweeney’s research has exposed discrimination in online advertising, where internet searches of names “racially associated” with the black community are 25% more likely to yield sponsored ads suggesting that the person has a criminal record, regardless of the truth. In her role as Editor-In-Chief of Technology Science, she reported that SAT test prep services charge zip codes with high proportions of Asian residents nearly double the average price, regardless of their actual income.
Prior to her current role, Sweeney was CTO of the Federal Trade Commission. She completed her undergraduate studies in computer science at Harvard and was the first black woman to receive a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.
Ruth Teitelbaum
Computer Programmer
Teitelbaum was selected as one of a group of seven women to be the first programmers of the ENIAC, which was the first all-electronic programmable computer. The computer was a huge machine with 40 black 8-foot panels. The programmers had to physically program it using 3000 switches, and telephone switching cords in a dozen trays, to route the data, and the program, through the machine.
Along with Marlyn Meltzer, Teitelbaum was part of a special area of the ENIAC project. Using analog technology, they calculated ballistic trajectory equations. In 1946, the ENIAC computer was unveiled before the public and the press. The seven women were the only generation of programmers to program the ENIAC and they went on to teach programming techniques to others.
Alan Turing
Computer Scientist, Mathematician, Logician, Cryptanalyst, Philosopher, and Theoretical Biologist
Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre that produced Ultraintelligence. Here he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war.
After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman’s Computing Machine Laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.
Manuela Veloso
Computer Scientist
A world renowned AI expert and leader in the field of autonomous robots, Manuela Velosa is the Head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University & Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She was the President of AAAI until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation, the robot soccer league where CMU teams have emerged as champions many times. She recently joined J.P. Morgan as their Head of AI Research and Machine Learning.
Jane Wang
Physicist
Jane Wang started out as an applied physicist modeling the complex network dynamics of memory systems in the brain before moving into experimental cognitive neuroscience as a postdoc at Northwestern. Since joining DeepMind two years ago, her non-machine learning background has equipped her with a unique set of tools and perspectives for tackling the hardest AI problems. “It’s exhilarating to formulate theories of human brain function as powerful deep reinforcement learning models that can solve similarly complex tasks,” she shares.
Though Wang has been successful without a formal AI background, she’s concerned the steep learning curve and hypercompetitive atmosphere of AI research can discourage diverse participation. “Although competitiveness drives the field forward, it also discourages those who wish to work in more inclusive, cooperative environments,” she warns. Wang is on a steering committee at DeepMind to increase diversity in AI and is encouraged by the AI community’s openness for sharing research and driving collective progress.
Marylyn Wescoff
Computer Programmer
After graduating from Temple University in 1942, she was hired by the Moore School of Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania to perform weather calculations as she knew how to operate an adding machine. In 1943, she was hired to calculate ballistics trajectories. Here a group of about 80 women worked manually calculating ballistic trajectories — complex differential calculations. These women were called ‘computers’. In 1945, the Army decided to fund an experimental project — the first all-electronic digital computer and six of the women ‘computers’ were selected to be its first programmers. Among these six was Marlyn Meltzer.
The ENIAC was the first all-electronic digital computer, a huge machine of forty black 8-foot panels. The programmers had none of the programming tools of today and it was a challenge to make the ENIAC work. The six programmers had to physically conduct the ballistic program using 3000 switches and dozens of switches and digital trays to route the data and program pulses through the machine.
Marlyn Meltzer was in a special team with Ruth Teitelbaum within the ENIAC project. They used analog technology to calculate ballistic trajectory equations. In 1946, the ENIAC computer was unveiled before the public and the press. The six women were the only generation of programmers to program the ENIAC. Though mentioned in the Woman of the ENIAC, Marlyn Meltzer and the other women did not receive due recognition at the time.
Marlyn Meltzer resigned from the team in 1947 to get married before the ENIAC was relocated to the Ballistics Research laboratory at Aberdeen, Maryland. In 1997, Meltzer was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame with the five other original programmers of the ENIAC.
Hua Wu
Computer Scientist, Researcher
In her 7 years at Baidu, technical chief Hua Wu has been responsible for a number of breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), dialogue systems, and neural machine translation (NMT). Her proposal for a multi-task learning framework for NMT was hailed by the New York Times as “pathbreaking” and successfully deployed at scale to hundreds of millions of users using Baidu’s translation products. She also built the technology behind Duer, Baidu’s conversational AI which powers home assistants and smart IoT devices. Wu received her PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-chairs leading academic AI conferences such as ACL and IJCAI.
All of the above content was pulled from various online sources. None of the writing or videos were created by me. Thank you Arpanet!
