Shun-ichi Amari
Japanese mathematical engineer who studied trainable multilayer networks in 1967 and founded information geometry and the natural-gradient method.
People
The researchers and builders behind the breakthroughs.
162 entries, all primary-sourced
Stuart Russell
Berkeley computer scientist, co-author of the standard AI textbook AIMA, and a leading advocate for rethinking AI around human control.
Terrence Sejnowski
Computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute who co-invented the Boltzmann machine with Hinton and built NETtalk, an early speech-from-text network.
Terry Winograd
Terry Winograd built SHRDLU, wrote a landmark book on language understanding, then turned to human-computer interaction at Stanford.
Timnit Gebru
Computer scientist known for the Gender Shades and Stochastic Parrots papers and founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).
Tom Brown
First author of the GPT-3 paper 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners' and a co-founder of Anthropic.
Tomas Mikolov
Czech researcher who created word2vec at Google, the method that made word embeddings practical and reshaped natural language processing.
Torsten Wiesel
Swedish neuroscientist who, with David Hubel, discovered orientation-selective cells in the visual cortex and shared the 1981 Nobel Prize.
Tri Dao
A Princeton professor and Together AI chief scientist whose FlashAttention and Mamba work reshaped how efficiently models handle long sequences.
Vladimir Vapnik
Co-creator of statistical learning theory, the VC dimension, and support vector machines, the methods that dominated machine learning before deep learning.
W. Grey Walter
Neurophysiologist who built Elmer and Elsie, electronic tortoises that were among the first autonomous robots to show lifelike behavior.
Walter Pitts
Self-taught logician who, with Warren McCulloch, wrote the 1943 paper modeling the neuron as a logical switch, then died in obscurity in 1969.
Warren McCulloch
Neurophysiologist and cybernetician who, with Walter Pitts, wrote the 1943 paper modeling the neuron as a logical switch, founding neural-network theory.
Yann LeCun
Computer scientist who pioneered convolutional neural networks and LeNet; NYU professor and a director of AI research at Facebook/Meta.
Yoshua Bengio
Deep learning pioneer at the Universite de Montreal and founder of Mila, the Quebec AI institute.
Zoubin Ghahramani
Cambridge professor and Google DeepMind research VP known for probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning.
Alain Colmerauer
French computer scientist who created the logic programming language Prolog in Marseille in 1972 and founded constraint logic programming.
Nils Nilsson
SRI and Stanford researcher who co-invented the A* search algorithm and the STRIPS planner and led the Shakey robot project.