Scott Aaronson, Manuel Blum, Shafi Goldwasser and Stuart Russell among Top 20 Influential Computer Scientists

CS alumnus Scott Aaronson (Ph.D. ’04, advisor: Umesh Vazirani) ranked #4, Prof. Emeritus Manuel Blum ranked #11, alumna and Prof. Shafi Goldwasser (M.S. ’81/Ph.D. ’84, advisor: Manuel Blum) ranked #12, and Prof. Stuart Russell ranked #14 on Academic Influence’s list of the Top Influential Computer Scientists from 2010 to 2020.  Scholars are ranked using a methodology that includes the number of citations, as well as their web presence,  to determine their impact and influence over society in the past 10 years: “Some have had revolutionary ideas, some may have climbed by popularity, but all are academicians primarily working in computer science.”  Aaronson, now at the University of Texas, Austin, is one of the world’s leading experts in quantum computing; Blum, now at Carnegie Mellon, works on the theoretical underpinnings of programming and algorithms, notably computational complexity theory, cryptography, and program verification; Goldwasser is an expert in computational complexity theory, cryptography, and number theory; and Russell, the author of the most popular textbook on Artificial Intelligence, is an expert in machine learning and reasoning, and a major proponent of provably beneficial AI.