Science People

Mathematician Norbert Wiener is widely considered the founder of cybernetics, the study of regulatory systems. His 1948 book Cybernetics treated feedback formally and framed control and communication as one problem for animals and machines.

American mathematician and electrical engineer whose 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" gave communication engineering a mathematical foundation.

Marc Raibert (born 1949) is a robotics researcher who built the first self-balancing hopping robots, founded Boston Dynamics, and is now executive director of the Boston Dynamics AI Institute.

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao is a computer scientist born in Shanghai who won the 2000 ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, and later founded Tsinghua University's Yao Class and IIIS.

Berlin-born American computer scientist who wrote ELIZA, an early program that held a written conversation with a user, and later published an influential critique of artificial intelligence.

American physicist born in 1933 who invented the Hopfield network in 1982, a model that stores and recalls patterns using ideas from spin physics, and who received half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.

David Rumelhart (1942–2011) was an American cognitive psychologist. His 1986 work with colleagues helped bring back-propagation and neural-network models to a wide audience.

Rodney Brooks (born 1954) is an Australian-born roboticist who promoted behaviour-based robotics and the subsumption architecture, directed MIT's AI Laboratory and CSAIL, and co-founded iRobot, Rethink Robotics and Robust.AI.

Protein scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, known for computational protein design: he designed a protein unlike any in nature in 2003 and received one half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Demis Hassabis is a British AI researcher and entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind and was the last author of the 2016 AlphaGo paper. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on predicting protein structures.

American scientist (born 1985) who worked on AlphaFold at Google DeepMind and shared half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Demis Hassabis for protein structure prediction.

Chelsea Finn is a computer scientist and assistant professor at Stanford University whose research spans meta-learning, deep reinforcement learning and robot learning; she is a co-founder of Physical Intelligence.

Ian Goodfellow is a machine learning researcher and first author of the 2014 paper that introduced generative adversarial networks, which train a generator and a discriminator against each other. He has worked at OpenAI, Google Brain, Apple and Google DeepMind.

American electrical engineer who built one of the first checkers-playing programs and, in a 1959 paper, helped name the field now called machine learning.

Sergey Levine is a computer scientist who studies how robots can learn control behaviour from data. He is a professor at UC Berkeley and a co-founder of Physical Intelligence.

Karol Hausman is a roboticist working on robot learning, sim-to-real transfer and embodied AI. He was a senior research scientist at Google Brain and Google DeepMind, is an adjunct professor at Stanford, and co-founded Physical Intelligence.

Shun-ichi Amari (born 1936) is a Japanese mathematical engineer who founded information geometry and built theoretical foundations for machine learning and neural networks; he received the 2025 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology.

Amnon Shashua is the founder of Mobileye, which grew out of his Hebrew University research into single-camera vehicle detection; he has led the company as chief executive since Intel acquired it in 2017.