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Researchers, founders, and other figures in the history of artificial intelligence.

A

  • Alan Turing

    British mathematician whose 1950 paper on the imitation game shaped how we ask whether machines can think. (1912–1954)

  • Alex Bernstein

    IBM researcher who demonstrated early computer chess at the 1956 Dartmouth workshop. (1930–1999)

  • Alex Krizhevsky

    PhD student who co-created AlexNet, the 2012 breakthrough that reignited deep learning in computer vision.

  • Alexander Wei

    OpenAI researcher who reported a gold-medal score at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad.

  • Andrei Markov

    Russian mathematician whose chains and processes underpin modern probabilistic models in AI. (1856–1922)

  • Arthur Samuel

    IBM engineer whose 1950s checkers program was among the first to learn by playing itself. (1901–1990)

B

  • Bernhard Boser

    UC Berkeley EECS professor who co-authored the 1992 optimal margin classifier paper and the 1989 zip-code CNN work at AT&T Bell Labs.

  • Brad Rutter

    Jeopardy! champion who faced IBM Watson in a 2011 exhibition match against Ken Jennings. (b. 1978)

C

  • Claude Shannon

    Mathematician who founded information theory and sketched one of the first chess-playing programs. (1916–2001)

  • Corinna Cortes

    Google researcher who co-authored the 1995 support-vector networks paper with Vladimir Vapnik. (b. 1961)

D

  • David Ackley

    Computer scientist who co-authored the 1985 Boltzmann machine learning algorithm.

  • David Baker

    Biochemist who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for computational protein design with AlphaFold. (b. 1962)

  • David Ferrucci

    IBM researcher who led the team that built Watson for the 2011 Jeopardy! challenge.

  • David Rumelhart

    Cognitive scientist who co-authored the 1986 backpropagation paper that revived neural network training. (1942–2011)

  • Demis Hassabis

    Co-founder of DeepMind who led AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (b. 1976)

E

  • Edward Feigenbaum

    Stanford computer scientist who championed expert systems in the 1970s and 1980s AI boom. (b. 1936)

F

  • Fei-Fei Li

    Computer vision researcher who created ImageNet, the dataset that launched the deep learning revolution. (b. 1976)

  • Feng-hsiung Hsu

    Computer scientist who led the IBM team that built Deep Blue and defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997. (b. 1959)

  • Frank Rosenblatt

    Cornell psychologist who built the Perceptron in 1958, an early trainable neural network. (1928–1971)

G

  • Garry Kasparov

    World chess champion who lost a 1997 match to IBM Deep Blue, a landmark moment for AI. (b. 1963)

  • Geoffrey Hinton

    Pioneer of neural networks who co-wrote backpropagation, led AlexNet, and won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. (b. 1947)

  • Gerald Tesauro

    IBM researcher who built TD-Gammon, a 1992 neural network that learned backgammon by self-play.

  • Gregor Dolinar

    President of the International Mathematical Olympiad who confirmed AI gold-medal scores in 2025. (b. 1971)

  • Guy Parmelin

    Swiss president who announced Geneva will host the next global AI summit in June 2027. (b. 1959)

H

  • Hany Farid

    Digital forensics researcher known for detecting manipulated images and synthetic media.

I

  • Ian Goodfellow

    Machine learning researcher who invented generative adversarial networks in 2014. (b. 1987)

  • Ilya Sutskever

    Co-author of AlexNet who later co-founded OpenAI and helped build large language models. (b. 1986)

  • Isabelle Guyon

    Machine learning researcher who co-authored the 1992 optimal margin classifier paper with Boser and Vapnik. (b. 1961)

J

  • James Lighthill

    British applied mathematician whose 1973 report helped trigger the first AI winter. (1924–1998)

  • JD Vance

    U.S. vice president who warned against heavy AI regulation at the 2025 Paris AI Action Summit. (b. 1984)

  • John Hopfield

    Physicist who created Hopfield networks and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for neural network work. (b. 1933)

  • John Jumper

    DeepMind researcher who led AlphaFold and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (b. 1985)

  • John McCarthy

    Computer scientist who coined the term artificial intelligence and organized the 1956 Dartmouth workshop. (1927–2011)

  • Joseph Weizenbaum

    MIT computer scientist who created ELIZA in 1966, an early natural-language chatbot. (1923–2008)

K

  • Ken Jennings

    Record Jeopardy! champion who competed against IBM Watson in a 2011 exhibition match. (b. 1974)

L

  • Lee Sedol

    South Korean Go master who lost a 2016 match to DeepMind AlphaGo. (b. 1983)

  • Leo Breiman

    Statistician who introduced random forests in 2001, combining bagging with decision trees. (1928–2005)

M

  • Marvin Minsky

    MIT cognitive scientist who co-wrote Perceptrons and helped launch the 1956 Dartmouth workshop. (1927–2016)

  • Michael Kratsios

    U.S. science policy official who led the American delegation at the 2026 India AI Impact Summit. (b. 1986)

  • Mustafa Suleyman

    Co-founder of DeepMind who later led consumer AI products at Microsoft. (b. August 1, 1984)

N

  • Narendra Modi

    Indian prime minister who co-chaired the 2025 Paris summit and hosted the 2026 AI Impact Summit. (b. 1950)

  • Nathaniel Rochester

    IBM engineer who co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth summer project on artificial intelligence. (1752–1831)

P

  • Pascal Vincent

    Canadian machine learning researcher who co-authored the 2003 neural probabilistic language model and later popularised denoising autoencoders.

  • Paul Smolensky

    Cognitive scientist who described the harmonium model, a precursor to restricted Boltzmann machines. (b. 1955)

R

  • Ray Solomonoff

    Dartmouth participant whose early work on algorithmic complexity influenced theories of learning. (1926–2009)

  • Ronald Williams

    Computer scientist who co-authored the 1986 backpropagation paper with Rumelhart and Hinton. (1945–2024)

  • Ruslan Salakhutdinov

    Computer scientist who co-authored the 2006 Science paper on deep autoencoders with Geoffrey Hinton.

S

  • Sam Altman

    CEO of OpenAI who oversaw the launches of ChatGPT and the GPT model family. (b. 1985)

  • Sebastian Thrun

    Stanford roboticist whose team won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge with the autonomous car Stanley. (b. 1967)

  • Seymour Papert

    MIT educator who co-wrote Perceptrons with Marvin Minsky in 1969. (1928–2016)

  • Shane Legg

    Co-founder of DeepMind who coined the term AGI in his doctoral research. (b. 1973)

  • Simon Osindero

    Research scientist who co-authored the 2006 deep belief network paper with Geoffrey Hinton.

T

  • Terrence Sejnowski

    Computational neuroscientist who co-authored the 1985 Boltzmann machine learning algorithm. (b. 1947)

V

  • Vladimir Vapnik

    Statistical learning theorist who co-created support vector machines and structural risk minimisation. (b. 1936)

Y

  • Yann LeCun

    Pioneer of convolutional neural networks and chief AI scientist at Meta. (b. 1959)

  • Yee-Whye Teh

    Oxford statistician who co-authored the 2006 deep belief network paper. (b. 1977)

  • Yoshua Bengio

    Canadian researcher whose deep learning work earned a share of the 2018 Turing Award. (b. 1964)