FREE COMPUTING HISTORY · 1963–1969
Distributed infrastructure
Large-scale services demand new databases, protocols, languages, and ways to reason through failure.
1963–1969
Large-scale services demand new databases, protocols, languages, and ways to reason through failure.
- Jürgen Schmidhuber — LSTM (with Hochreiter); RNNs; formal theory of curiosity/creativity; compressed network search
- Jensen Huang — NVIDIA; CUDA; GPU computing; AI hardware
- Kevin Mitnick — Most famous hacker; social engineering; security awareness
- Rich Hickey — Created Clojure — Lisp on the JVM; immutable data; persistent data structures; "Simple Made Easy"
- Martin Fowler — Refactoring; Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture; agile methodology
- Hideo Kojima — Metal Gear Solid; Death Stranding; cinematic game narrative
- Matt Blaze — Cryptography research; Clipper chip analysis; security research
- Jeff Bezos — Amazon; AWS — cloud computing pioneer
- Yoshua Bengio — Neural language models; attention mechanisms; word embeddings; GAN training; deep learning theory
- Christopher Manning — Stanford NLP Group; GloVe; dependency parsing; neural NLP foundations; Foundations of Statistical NLP
- Nick Szabo — Coined "smart contracts" (1994); Bit Gold concept (proto-Bitcoin); cypherpunk
- Oren Etzioni — Allen Institute for AI; semantic web; MetaCrawler
- Joel Spolsky — Co-founded Stack Overflow; Joel on Software; Trello; Fog Creek
- Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto — Created Ruby; "optimized for programmer happiness"
- Joan Daemen — Co-designed Rijndael, selected by NIST as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
- Pedro Domingos — The Master Algorithm; Markov logic networks; machine learning theory
- Håkon Wium Lie — CSS co-creator; web standards advocate; Opera CTO
- Jimmy Wales — Co-founded Wikipedia
- Sanjay Ghemawat — GFS; MapReduce; BigTable; LevelDB (with Jeff Dean)
- Eric Brewer — CAP theorem (consistency, availability, partition tolerance); Google VP Infrastructure
- Madhu Sudan — PCP theorem contributions; error-correcting codes; list decoding
- Mark Russinovich — Windows internals; Sysinternals; Azure CTO; Windows Internals
- Ken Levine — BioShock; System Shock 2; narrative-driven games
- Pierre Omidyar — Founded eBay
- Satya Nadella — Microsoft CEO; Azure; OpenAI partnership
- Sepp Hochreiter — Co-invented LSTM; vanishing gradient problem analysis (1991)
- Sebastian Thrun — Google self-driving car; Udacity; probabilistic robotics; Stanford AI Lab director
- Jony Ive — Apple chief design officer — iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad industrial design
- Reid Hoffman — Co-founded LinkedIn; early PayPal; AI investor
- Peter Thiel — Co-founded PayPal and Palantir
- Andrew Tridgell — Samba; rsync; git bisect; reverse engineering expert
- Daphne Koller — Probabilistic graphical models; co-founded Coursera; Insitro; Stanford AI
- Jeff Dean — MapReduce; BigTable; TensorFlow; Google Brain; Google AI chief; word2vec (team)
- Rasmus Lerdorf — Created PHP
- Sanjeev Arora — PCP theorem (with Safra); approximation algorithms; Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach
- Bernhard Schölkopf — Kernel methods; causal inference in ML; Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
- Theodore Ts'o — ext2/3/4 filesystems; Linux kernel; first North American Linux kernel developer
- Dan Boneh — Pairing-based cryptography; identity-based encryption; Stanford crypto group; Coursera crypto course
- Linus Torvalds — Linux kernel; Git version control
- Lisa Su — AMD CEO; Zen architecture revival; RDNA GPUs; chiplet strategy