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/AES: the encryption standard protecting most of the world's data
- 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