Ghavam Shahidi

Chief architect of silicon on insulator (SOI) complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology at IBM, Shahidi is an Iranian-American electrical engineer and IBM Fellow. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees, all in...

Frederick Jelinek

Pioneer of speech recognition, Jelinek was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing, well known for his oft-quoted statement, "Every time I fire a linguist, the...

Richard (Dick) John Egan

Member of the team that developed the Apollo Guidance Computer for the Apollo spacecraft that carried astronauts to the moon, Egan was also a prominent American businessman, political fundraiser, and former US...

Phaedon Avouris

Innovator of the potential for carbon nanotubes to compete with the long-established silicon transistor for important information technology applications, Avouris is a Greek chemical physicist who has served as an IBM Fellow...

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwārizmī

Presenter of the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations in Arabic, al-Khwārizmī was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and geographer—a scholar in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad whose life spanned...

Susan Kare

Creator of many of the interface elements for the Apple Macintosh, Kare is an artist and graphic designer whose iconic work includes the Lasso, the Grabber, and the Paint Bucket icons, and...

Charles R. Trimble

Developer of the Global Positioning System (GPS) for commercial and consumer applications, Trimble founded Trimble Navigation Limited (TNL) in 1978 along with two partners from Hewlett-Packard, initially operating from Los Altos, California....

Lorinda Cherry

A longtime member of the original Unix Lab at Bell Labs, Cherry devoted much of her career to developing mathematical tools and utilities for text formatting and analysis, and influenced the creation...

John Theurer Diebold

An early champion of widespread use of computing and automated technology, Diebold helped shape how businesses understood and adopted automation. Diebold was born in Weehawken, New Jersey. He graduated from Swarthmore College in...

John Matthew Vlissides

Co-author, as one of the "Gang of Four", of the influential software engineering textbook Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Vlissides referred to himself as "#4 of the Gang of Four...

George Dyson

Author of Turing's Cathedral (2012), described as "a creation myth of the digital universe," Dyson is an author and historian of technology whose publications broadly cover the evolution of technology in relation...

Bruce D. Shriver

Worldwide lecturer in the design and implementation of computer hardware and software systems, Shriver has been a computer science academic, consultant, and entrepreneur in the area of high-performance computer systems, publishing extensively...

Stephen Arthur Cook

Known for profoundly advancing our understanding of the complexity of computation, Cook is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who made major contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity....

Alan Jay Perlis

A pioneer in advanced programming techniques and compiler construction, Perlis was the first recipient of the ACM Turing Award in 1966, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize of Computing." Perlis was born on April...

Thomas (Tom) O. Stanley

Fundamental investigator of the CED concept that led to the development of the RCA VideoDisc system, Stanley has been recognized as "a visionary who, not only foresaw the CED videodisc system long...

Dan Fylstra

Founding Associate Editor of BYTE Magazine and co-developer and marketer of VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet program, Fylstra has been a pioneer of the computer industry since the 1970s. In 1978 he co-founded...

Wayne D. Pickette

Conceptualized as the design for putting a computer on a chip, Pickette's work is arguably one of the greatest technological advances of the Twentieth Century. A self-taught childhood electronics prodigy, he recalled...

John Thomas Stasko, III

Renowned for extensive research in information visualization and visual analytics, as well as software visualization and algorithm animation, Stasko has served as a Professor in and the Associate Chair of the School...

Mark Pincus

Co-founder of Zynga, which makes online social games, Pincus also founded Freeloader, Inc., Tribe Networks, and SupportSoft. He has served as CEO of Zynga, which had 235 million monthly active users as...

Michael T. Goodrich

Pioneer and research leader on efficient parallel and distributed solutions, Goodrich has served as a Chancellor's Professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science of the Donald Bren School of Information...