Brenda L. Dietrich

Leader of the emerging technologies team in the IBM Watson group, Dietrich has brought a business perspective to projects at the forefront of applied mathematics. She has served as Vice President of...

Diane B. Greene

Co-founder and former CEO of VMware, Greene led the company through an IPO and to a $2B run-rate. Born in Rochester, New York, she was raised in Annapolis, Md. She received her...

Daniel Henry Holms Ingalls, Jr.

Inventor of BitBlit, the general-purpose graphical operation underlying most bitmap graphics systems, Ingalls is a pioneer of object-oriented computer programming and the principal architect, designer, and implementor of five generations of Smalltalk...

Alan Gara

Technical leader for three generations of IBM Blue Gene supercomputers, Gara's Blue Gene/L system held the #1 position on the Top500 list for five consecutive dates. He has served as an IBM...

Richard Lawrence Grimsdale

Designer and developer of the world's first transistorized computer, the Metrovick 950, Grimsdale was born in Australia, returned to England with his parents, and later studied electrical engineering at Manchester University, graduating...

Thomas E. Osborne

Developer of the architecture for the HP9100A, an early computer, Osborne joined Hewlett-Packard in 1965 as a consultant with that responsibility. Prior to joining HP, he had designed data processing equipment, then...

Alain Glavieux

Co-inventor of turbo codes, Glavieux was a French professor of electrical engineering at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications de Bretagne. He was the coinventor with Claude Berrou and Punya Thitimajshima of a...

Rama Chellappa

Pioneer researcher in image processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition, Chellappa has served as a Minta Martin Professor of Engineering (from 2005) and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and...

Travis Cordell Kalanick

Co-founder of Uber, the transportation network company connecting passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire and ridesharing services, Kalanick is an American entrepreneur who also co-founded the peer-to-peer file sharing company Red...

Ramesh Chandra Jain

Developer of some of the early visual information retrieval systems, Jain is also the founder of IEEE Multimedia and the company Virage. He graduated with a Bachelor's degree from Nagpur University, Nagpur,...

Joseph Weizenbaum

Creator of ELIZA, the pioneering natural language processing program that prompted his growing skepticism about artificial intelligence, Weizenbaum died March 5, 2008 in Berlin. He was 85. Joseph Weizenbaum was born on January...

Margaret R. Fox

Member of the technical staff of the Electronic Computer Laboratory at the National Bureau of Standards, Fox graduated from Wisconsin State College in 1940 and joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943,...

Marian Adam Rejewski

Solver of the plugboard-equipped Enigma machine, the main cipher device used by Germany, Rejewski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who accomplished this feat in 1932. His success, along with his colleagues...

Jennifer Pahlka

Founder of Code for America and a key figure in bringing civic technology to the forefront of American public policy, Pahlka served as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer from June 2013 to...

Gerrit (Gerry) Anne Blaauw

One of the principal designers of the IBM System/360 line of computers, Blaauw worked alongside Fred Brooks, Gene Amdahl, and others on this landmark project. In 1947, he won an exclusive scholarship funded...

Georgy Adelson-Velsky

Co-inventor of the AVL tree and head developer of the Kaissa chess computer, Adelson-Velsky made foundational contributions to both computer science and computer chess. In 1962, Georgy and E.M. Landis published a...

Robert William Bemer

Best known as "The Father of ASCII," Bemer made foundational contributions to computing through his work on COBOL and the ASCII character codeset. Bemer began his career as an aerodynamicist at Douglas Aircraft...

Arthur L. Samuel

Pioneer in computer gaming and artificial intelligence, Samuel is most known within the AI community for his groundbreaking work in computer checkers. He thought that teaching computers to play games was very...

Barbara Liskov

A pioneer in object-oriented programming, Liskov's work in programming methodology has affected all aspects of modern computing, including programming languages, object-oriented programming, and software robustness to hacking. She designed CLU, an object-oriented...

Adam Osborne

Creator of the first commercially successful portable computer, Osborne transformed personal computing in the early 1980s. Adam Osborne was born in Thailand in 1939 to British parents and spent much of his childhood...