Sandy Lerner

Co-founder of Cisco Systems and co-designer of the first router connecting Stanford's computer systems, Lerner received her Bachelor's Degree in 1975 in Political Science from California State University, Chico, a Master's Degree...

Jefferson (Jeff) Y. Han

Co-developer of "multi-touch sensing," Han is a research scientist at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences who helped create touch-screen interfaces able to recognize multiple points of contact. He also worked on...

Tsutomu Shimomura

Best known for his contributions to lattice gas automata and digital security research, Shimomura has made significant contributions to both computational physics and computer security. In the fall of 1984 he joined the...

Lawrence Moser Breed

Creator of the first computer animation language and system, Breed built it as an undergraduate at Stanford University in 1961 and used it at Stanford football half-times to coordinate images produced by...

Douglas B. Lenat

Prominent in artificial intelligence and machine learning research, Lenat was best known for the Cyc project, an attempt to build the basis of a general artificial intelligence by manually representing knowledge in...

James Henry Rand, Jr.

Founder and President of Remington Rand, Rand built what became the largest business machine manufacturing plant in the world and showed remarkable foresight in purchasing the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1950, whose...

Jakob Nielsen

Founder of the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces, Nielsen invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation — a usability inspection method for computer software that...

Alexander Matveevich Poniatoff

Founder of AMPEX, Poniatoff established the company in 1944, using his initials, A.M.P., plus "ex" for "excellence" to create the name. The high-frequency bias technique, which made quality recording possible, was invented...

Brewster Kahle

Founder of the Internet Archive and creator of WAIS and Alexa Internet, Kahle has been a pioneering force in digital access and preservation. He was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity....

Larry R. Harris

Internationally recognized as an expert on database systems and computerized natural language, Harris founded EasyAsk as Linguistic Technology Corporation (LTC) in 1994 and authored its EasyAsk and English Wizard products. As Vice...

Norman H. Nie

Co-inventor of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), Nie transformed how researchers analyze data. An American social scientist, university professor, inventor, and pioneering technology entrepreneur, he was born in St....

William Seward Burroughs

Inventor of the adding machine, Burroughs was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. An American inventor, born in Rochester, New York, the son of a mechanic, he worked with...

Jean David Ichbiah

Chief designer of the Ada programming language, Ichbiah was a French-born computer scientist who led the design of Ada (from 1977–1983), a general-purpose, strongly typed programming language with certified validated compilers. At...

Susie Wee

Founder of Cisco DevNet, Wee went on to serve as its Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer beginning in 2018. She established DevNet in 2014, and previously held the role of...

Fernanda Bertini Viégas

Co-creator of Many Eyes, the ground-breaking open public data visualization and analysis platform, Viégas is a Brazilian-born scientist and computational designer whose work focuses on the social, collaborative, and artistic aspects of...

Phillip Walter Katz

Co-creator of the zip file format for data compression and author of PKZIP, a program for creating zip files which ran under DOS, Katz graduated from the Computer Science Engineering program at...

Aart J. de Geus

One of the world's leading experts on logic synthesis and simulation, de Geus is the founder, Chairman and CEO of Synopsys Inc., a fellow of IEEE, and Phil Kaufman Award winner. He...

Ram Chillarege

Inventor of Orthogonal Defect Classification (ODC) technology, Chillarege has fundamentally enriched the management of software engineering. While at IBM Research, he founded the Center of Software Engineering and authored the seminal IBM...

Jay N. Goldberg

Purchaser of Money Management Systems, Inc. (MMS) in 1986, Goldberg acquired the firm — which sold software and services to banks and broker-dealers for securities trading activities — from Ziff-Davis, later selling...

Gabe Logan Newell

Producer of the first three releases of Windows, Newell later founded Valve, producing one of the best-selling PC games ever, Half-Life.