Research & Academia
140 people
Abhinav Gupta 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder of Skild AI building a general-purpose robotics foundation model, and a Carnegie Mellon robotics professor known for self-supervised robot learning. 
Skild AI 
Alan Turing 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Father of Computer Science and AI 
Albert Gu 🇺🇸 Research & Academia CMU professor Cartesia 
Alex Graves 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Neural Turing Machines, Attention Mechanisms 
Google DeepMind 
Alex Kendall 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Co-founder and CEO of Wayve, pioneering an end-to-end deep learning ('AV2.0') approach to autonomous driving and embodied AI. Developed foundational end-to-end self-driving research at the University of Cambridge. 
Wayve Alex Krizhevsky 🇨🇦 Research & Academia AlexNet, ImageNet Challenge Winner 
Alex Smola 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Kernel Methods, AutoGluon, Machine Learning 
Boson AI Ali Agha 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Founded Field AI to build AI models enabling autonomous robots to operate in unstructured real-world environments, after leading autonomy research at NASA JPL. Field AI Amar Shah 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Co-founded Wayve, a London-based lab pioneering end-to-end learned self-driving AI. Wayve 
Andrej Karpathy 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI educator - Tesla AI 
Andrew Barto 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Professor Emeritus at UMass Amherst who, with Richard Sutton, developed the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. Co-recipient of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award. 
Andrew Carr 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Cartwheel Co-founder, Generative AI for Animation 
Cartwheel 
Andrew Ng 🇺🇸 Research & Academia DeepLearning.ai founder Landing AI Andrew Tulloch 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI researcher at Meta Superintelligence Labs (TBD Labs). Co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati in 2025 before rejoining Meta; earlier spent over a decade at Meta and worked at OpenAI. Meta Superintelligence Labs 
Andrew Yao 🇨🇳 Research & Academia Turing Award winner, foundational contributions to computational complexity and cryptography 
Anima Anandkumar 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Neural Operators, AI for Science Ashish Vaswani 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Transformer architecture creator 
Adept AI Ashok Elluswamy 🇺🇸 Research & Academia VP of AI Software at Tesla and the first Autopilot engineer, leading the vision-only, end-to-end neural network approach for Full Self-Driving and the Optimus humanoid robot program. 
Tesla Optimus 
Ben Goertzel 🇺🇸 Research & Academia SingularityNET Founder, AGI Research 
SingularityNET Ben Mildenhall 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Lead author of the 2020 NeRF paper that introduced Neural Radiance Fields, transforming 3D scene reconstruction and neural rendering. Co-founder of World Labs. 
World Labs Bernt Børnich 🇳🇴 Research & Academia Founder and CEO of 1X Technologies (originally Halodi Robotics, 2014), developing general-purpose humanoid robots including the home robot NEO. 1X Technologies Bernt Øyvind Børnich 🇳🇴 Research & Academia Founder and CEO of 1X Technologies, an OpenAI-backed humanoid robot company. 1X Technologies Bojan Tunguz 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Kaggle Grandmaster, Machine Learning Competitions 
Brian Christian 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Alignment Research, Popular Science Writing Brian Ichter 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder of Physical Intelligence, building general-purpose foundation models for robots; formerly a robotics researcher at Google DeepMind. 
Physical Intelligence 
Cassie Kozyrkov 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Google's First Chief Decision Scientist, Decision Intelligence 
Chelsea Finn 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Stanford professor Physical Intelligence Chris Olah 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Anthropic co-founder 
Anthropic 
Chris Urmson 🇺🇸 Research & Academia CEO and co-founder of Aurora Innovation who previously led Google's self-driving car project. 
Aurora Innovation 
Christopher Bishop 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Microsoft Research AI4Science Director, Deep Learning textbook author Microsoft AI 
Christopher Manning 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Stanford NLP Group, Natural Language Processing Craig Le Clair 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Forrester Research on Automation and AI 
Cynthia Breazeal 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Pioneer of Social Robotics, Creator of Kismet Damion Shelton 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and CEO of Agility Robotics, maker of the Digit humanoid robot. 
Agility Robotics Daniel Huttenlocher 🇺🇸 Research & Academia MIT Schwarzman College Dean, The Age of AI co-author 
Daniela Rus 🇺🇸 Research & Academia MIT CSAIL Director, Robotics Research 
Liquid AI 
Daphne Koller 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Insitro founder Insitro 
Dario Gil 🇺🇸 Research & Academia IBM Research Director, Quantum Computing 
David Baker 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington and pioneer of computational and AI-driven protein design. Awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for building entirely new proteins that do not exist in nature. 
David Silver 🇬🇧 Research & Academia DeepMind VP Reinforcement Learning, AlphaGo/AlphaZero Google DeepMind Deepak Pathak 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and CEO of Skild AI, developing a general-purpose robotics foundation model, and assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Known for research on self-supervised learning and sim2real robot learning. Skild AI Diederik P. Kingma 🇳🇱 Research & Academia Variational Autoencoders, Generative Models Anthropic Dileep George 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Vicarious AI Co-founder, Neuroscience-inspired AI 
Numenta 
Dmitri Dolgov 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-CEO of Waymo and a founder of the Google self-driving car project (2009). Leads the technology behind the Waymo Driver, one of the first commercial robotaxi services. 
Waymo Drew Bagnell 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and chief scientist of Aurora Innovation and CMU robotics professor specializing in machine learning for self-driving technology. Aurora Innovation 
Edward Feigenbaum 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Expert Systems Pioneer, Stanford AI Lab Emma Brunskill 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Stanford Reinforcement Learning Research 
Eric Horvitz 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Microsoft Research Chief Scientific Officer Microsoft AI 
Ernest Davis 🇺🇸 Research & Academia NYU professor, AI commonsense reasoning expert, Rebooting AI co-author Fei Fang 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Game Theory and AI Security Research 
Fei-Fei Li 🇺🇸 Research & Academia ImageNet creator World Labs François Fleuret 🇨🇭 Research & Academia Meta FAIR researcher, University of Geneva professor, Little Book of Deep Learning author 
Gary Marcus 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Criticism, Cognitive Science Robust.AI 
Geoffrey Hinton 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Godfather of Deep Learning Geordie Rose 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Co-founded Sanctuary AI (general-purpose humanoid robots) after founding quantum computing pioneer D-Wave and AI firm Kindred. 
Sanctuary AI Ginevra Castellano 🇸🇪 Research & Academia Human-Robot Interaction Research Greg Yang 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Creator of the Tensor Programs framework and Maximal Update Parameterization (muP/muTransfer), which enables hyperparameter transfer from small to very large neural networks. Founding member of xAI (stepped back to informal advisor in early 2026). xAI 
Herbert A. Simon 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Pioneer, Nobel Prize Winner, Cognitive Science 
Hiroshi Ishiguro 🇯🇵 Research & Academia Android Robotics, Humanoid Robots Hugo Larochelle 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Google Brain Research, Deep Learning Ian Goodfellow 🇺🇸 Research & Academia GAN inventor Google DeepMind Ilya Sutskever 🇺🇸 Research & Academia OpenAI co-founder - GPT architect 
OpenAI 
Jakub Pachocki 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Chief Scientist of OpenAI, succeeding Ilya Sutskever in 2024. Led development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five, and directs OpenAI's frontier research toward an automated AI researcher. OpenAI Jeff Clune 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Research, Evolutionary Algorithms Google DeepMind 
Jeff Dean 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Google Chief Scientist, TensorFlow, MapReduce Google DeepMind 
Jeff Hawkins 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Numenta Founder, Brain-Inspired AI Numenta Jesse Levinson 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and CTO of Zoox, Amazon's autonomous robotaxi company; earlier led self-driving research at Stanford. 
Zoox 
Jimmy Ba 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Associate professor at the University of Toronto and co-author of the Adam optimizer, one of the most widely used and cited methods in deep learning. Co-founded xAI in 2023 (departed early 2026). 
Jitendra Malik 🇺🇸 Research & Academia UC Berkeley Computer Vision, Object Recognition Meta Superintelligence Labs 
Joelle Pineau 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Meta AI Research, Reinforcement Learning 
Cohere 
John Carmack 🇺🇸 Research & Academia id Software Co-founder, Game Engine Development 
Keen Technologies John Ha 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Founded Bear Robotics, maker of autonomous serving and delivery robots for hospitality. 
Bear Robotics 
John Jumper 🇺🇸 Research & Academia DeepMind AlphaFold lead Google DeepMind 
John McCarthy 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Pioneer, Coined 'Artificial Intelligence', LISP Creator John Schulman 🇺🇸 Research & Academia OpenAI Research, PPO Algorithm, RLHF OpenAI Jonathan Hurst 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founded Agility Robotics, maker of the bipedal humanoid robot Digit. Agility Robotics Josh Tenenbaum 🇺🇸 Research & Academia MIT professor 
Judea Pearl 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Causal Inference, Bayesian Networks, Turing Award Winner 
Jürgen Schmidhuber 🇨🇭 Research & Academia LSTM Co-inventor, Neural Network Pioneer Justin Johnson 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Computer vision researcher who co-created Stanford's CS231n deep learning course in 2015 with Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy. Co-founded spatial-intelligence company World Labs. World Labs Kaiming He 🇺🇸 Research & Academia ResNet Creator, Computer Vision Research Karol Hausman 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence, building general-purpose foundation models for robots. Previously a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind/Google Brain focused on robot learning. Physical Intelligence 
Kate Crawford 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Ethics Research, Atlas of AI 
Kate Devlin 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Human-Robot Interaction, AI Ethics Kirk Borne 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Data Science Education, AI Advocacy DataPrime, Inc. Koray Kavukcuoglu 🇬🇧 Research & Academia CTO of Google DeepMind and, since June 2025, Google's first Chief AI Architect, leading development of Gemini and generative AI across Google's products. Co-author of the landmark DQN Atari, AlphaGo and WaveNet papers. Google DeepMind Kristen DiCerbo 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Educational AI, Learning Analytics 
Kyle Vogt 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and former CEO of self-driving company Cruise, and co-founder of Twitch. 
Cruise Kyogu Lee 🇰🇷 Research & Academia Audio AI Research, Music Technology 
Supertone Lachy Groom Research & Academia Co-founded Physical Intelligence, a company building general-purpose foundation models for robotics. Physical Intelligence 
Leslie Valiant 🇺🇸 Research & Academia PAC Learning Theory, Turing Award Winner 
Lotfi Zadeh 🇮🇷 Research & Academia Fuzzy logic pioneer, fuzzy set theory creator 
Manuela Veloso 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Multi-agent systems, robot soccer, AI planning 
Marc Raibert 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Boston Dynamics founder, legged robotics pioneer 
Boston Dynamics 
Mark Chen 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Chief Research Officer of OpenAI. Architect of DALL-E, Codex and the o1 reasoning models, co-leading OpenAI's research division alongside Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki. OpenAI 
Marvin Minsky 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Pioneer, MIT AI Lab Co-founder, Cognitive Science 
Max Bennett 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI entrepreneur, A Brief History of Intelligence author 
Alby 
Melanie Mitchell 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Research, Complexity Science, AI Criticism 
Meredith Broussard 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Criticism, Algorithmic Accountability Michael I. Jordan 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Machine Learning Pioneer, Statistical Learning Mikhail Jones 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founded Agility Robotics, maker of the bipedal humanoid robot Digit. Agility Robotics Nick Paine 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founded Apptronik, developer of the Apollo humanoid robot, serving as its technical lead. 
Apptronik Noam Brown 🇺🇸 Research & Academia VP of Research at OpenAI and a foundational contributor to the o1/o3 reasoning models. Previously created the poker AIs Libratus and Pluribus and the Diplomacy AI CICERO. OpenAI Olivia Norton 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Co-founded Sanctuary AI, which develops humanoid robots aimed at general-purpose physical labor. Sanctuary AI 
Oren Etzioni 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Allen Institute for AI CEO, AI Research 
Allen Institute for AI (AI2) Oriol Vinyals 🇬🇧 Research & Academia VP of Research at Google DeepMind and co-technical lead of Gemini. Pioneered sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) learning and led AlphaStar, contributing to core work behind modern multimodal AI models. Google DeepMind Percy Liang 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Stanford HAI director 
Together AI Peter Chen 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and CEO of Covariant, building AI models for robotic manipulation; previously a researcher at OpenAI. Covariant 
Pieter Abbeel 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Covariant co-founder Covariant Pushmeet Kohli 🇬🇧 Research & Academia VP of Research at Google DeepMind, founding and leading the AI for Science unit behind Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold, plus AlphaProof, AlphaGenome, AlphaEvolve and more. Also Chief Scientist of Google Cloud. Google DeepMind 
Raj Reddy 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Speech Recognition Pioneer, Turing Award Winner 
Rana el Kaliouby 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Affectiva Co-founder, Emotion AI Pioneer Regina Barzilay 🇺🇸 Research & Academia NLP for healthcare, cancer treatment AI research 
Richard Socher 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Natural language processing, Salesforce AI research 
You.com 
Richard Sutton 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Reinforcement Learning Pioneer, Temporal Difference Learning Keen Technologies Rocky Duan Research & Academia Medeoprichter van Covariant, dat AI-modellen ontwikkelt voor robotmanipulatie in magazijnen. Covariant 
Rodney Brooks 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Behavior-Based Robotics, iRobot Co-founder Robust.AI 
Ruslan Salakhutdinov 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Deep learning research, CMU professor, Apple AI director 
Safiya Noble 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Algorithmic Bias Research, Digital Discrimination Sam McCandlish 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder of Anthropic and former Head of Research Engineering. Theoretical physicist who worked on scaling laws for AI systems and drives the company's research direction. Anthropic Samir Menon 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Founded Dexterity, developing AI-powered robots for warehouse and logistics manipulation tasks. 
Dexterity Sebastian Ruder 🇩🇪 Research & Academia NLP Research, Transfer Learning Cohere 
Sepp Hochreiter 🇦🇹 Research & Academia LSTM Co-inventor, Deep Learning Pioneer 
NXAI Sergey Levine 🇺🇸 Research & Academia UC Berkeley professor Physical Intelligence Shengjia Zhao 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Chief Scientist and co-founder of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Previously at OpenAI, where he contributed to ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the o1 reasoning model. Meta Superintelligence Labs Shunyu Yao 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Chief AI Scientist at Tencent (Hunyuan); creator of the ReAct and Tree of Thoughts agent paradigms and the SWE-bench coding benchmark; ex-OpenAI (Deep Research, Operator). 
Tencent Hunyuan Suzanne Gildert 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Co-founded Sanctuary AI to build general-purpose humanoid robots; a physicist previously at D-Wave Systems and co-founder of Kindred. Sanctuary AI Tang Jie 🇨🇳 Research & Academia Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Zhipu AI and Tsinghua professor; architect of the GLM / ChatGLM model family and creator of the AMiner academic network. 
Zhipu AI (Z.ai, GLM) Tang Xiao’ou 🇨🇳 Research & Academia SenseTime founder, computer vision research pioneer 
SenseTime Tianhao Zhang 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founded Covariant, a startup applying deep reinforcement learning to warehouse robot manipulation. Covariant Tim Kentley-Klay 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder of Zoox, the autonomous robotaxi company later acquired by Amazon. Zoox 
Tom M. Mitchell 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Machine Learning Pioneer, CMU AI Research Vincent Granville 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Data Science Education, Machine Learning Vladimir Vapnik 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Support Vector Machines, Statistical Learning Theory Yann Dauphin 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Meta AI Research, Deep Learning 
Yann LeCun 🇫🇷 Research & Academia Convolutional Neural Networks Meta Superintelligence Labs 
Yoav Shoham 🇮🇱 Research & Academia Stanford AI Research, AI Index 
AI21 Labs Yonghui Wu 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Head of foundational research at ByteDance Seed (Doubao); former VP at Google DeepMind on Gemini and Google Neural Machine Translation. 
ByteDance Seed 
Yoshua Bengio 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Deep Learning pioneer Zhou Jingren 🇨🇳 Research & Academia CTO of Alibaba Cloud; leads the Tongyi Lab and the development of the Qwen large language model family. 
Alibaba Qwen
Skild AI Alan Turing 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Father of Computer Science and AI Albert Gu 🇺🇸 Research & Academia CMU professor Cartesia Alex Graves 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Neural Turing Machines, Attention Mechanisms Google DeepMind Alex Kendall 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Co-founder and CEO of Wayve, pioneering an end-to-end deep learning ('AV2.0') approach to autonomous driving and embodied AI. Developed foundational end-to-end self-driving research at the University of Cambridge. Wayve Alex Krizhevsky 🇨🇦 Research & Academia AlexNet, ImageNet Challenge Winner Alex Smola 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Kernel Methods, AutoGluon, Machine Learning Boson AI Ali Agha 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Founded Field AI to build AI models enabling autonomous robots to operate in unstructured real-world environments, after leading autonomy research at NASA JPL. Field AI Amar Shah 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Co-founded Wayve, a London-based lab pioneering end-to-end learned self-driving AI. Wayve Andrej Karpathy 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI educator - Tesla AI Andrew Barto 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Professor Emeritus at UMass Amherst who, with Richard Sutton, developed the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. Co-recipient of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award. Andrew Carr 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Cartwheel Co-founder, Generative AI for Animation Cartwheel Andrew Ng 🇺🇸 Research & Academia DeepLearning.ai founder Landing AI Andrew Tulloch 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI researcher at Meta Superintelligence Labs (TBD Labs). Co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati in 2025 before rejoining Meta; earlier spent over a decade at Meta and worked at OpenAI. Meta Superintelligence Labs Andrew Yao 🇨🇳 Research & Academia Turing Award winner, foundational contributions to computational complexity and cryptography Anima Anandkumar 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Neural Operators, AI for Science Ashish Vaswani 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Transformer architecture creator Adept AI Ashok Elluswamy 🇺🇸 Research & Academia VP of AI Software at Tesla and the first Autopilot engineer, leading the vision-only, end-to-end neural network approach for Full Self-Driving and the Optimus humanoid robot program. Tesla Optimus Ben Goertzel 🇺🇸 Research & Academia SingularityNET Founder, AGI Research SingularityNET Ben Mildenhall 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Lead author of the 2020 NeRF paper that introduced Neural Radiance Fields, transforming 3D scene reconstruction and neural rendering. Co-founder of World Labs. World Labs Bernt Børnich 🇳🇴 Research & Academia Founder and CEO of 1X Technologies (originally Halodi Robotics, 2014), developing general-purpose humanoid robots including the home robot NEO. 1X Technologies Bernt Øyvind Børnich 🇳🇴 Research & Academia Founder and CEO of 1X Technologies, an OpenAI-backed humanoid robot company. 1X Technologies Bojan Tunguz 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Kaggle Grandmaster, Machine Learning Competitions Brian Christian 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Alignment Research, Popular Science Writing Brian Ichter 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder of Physical Intelligence, building general-purpose foundation models for robots; formerly a robotics researcher at Google DeepMind. Physical Intelligence Cassie Kozyrkov 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Google's First Chief Decision Scientist, Decision Intelligence Chelsea Finn 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Stanford professor Physical Intelligence Chris Olah 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Anthropic co-founder Anthropic Chris Urmson 🇺🇸 Research & Academia CEO and co-founder of Aurora Innovation who previously led Google's self-driving car project. Aurora Innovation Christopher Bishop 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Microsoft Research AI4Science Director, Deep Learning textbook author Microsoft AI Christopher Manning 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Stanford NLP Group, Natural Language Processing Craig Le Clair 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Forrester Research on Automation and AI Cynthia Breazeal 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Pioneer of Social Robotics, Creator of Kismet Damion Shelton 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and CEO of Agility Robotics, maker of the Digit humanoid robot. Agility Robotics Daniel Huttenlocher 🇺🇸 Research & Academia MIT Schwarzman College Dean, The Age of AI co-author Daniela Rus 🇺🇸 Research & Academia MIT CSAIL Director, Robotics Research Liquid AI Daphne Koller 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Insitro founder Insitro Dario Gil 🇺🇸 Research & Academia IBM Research Director, Quantum Computing David Baker 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington and pioneer of computational and AI-driven protein design. Awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for building entirely new proteins that do not exist in nature. David Silver 🇬🇧 Research & Academia DeepMind VP Reinforcement Learning, AlphaGo/AlphaZero Google DeepMind Deepak Pathak 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and CEO of Skild AI, developing a general-purpose robotics foundation model, and assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Known for research on self-supervised learning and sim2real robot learning. Skild AI Diederik P. Kingma 🇳🇱 Research & Academia Variational Autoencoders, Generative Models Anthropic Dileep George 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Vicarious AI Co-founder, Neuroscience-inspired AI Numenta Dmitri Dolgov 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-CEO of Waymo and a founder of the Google self-driving car project (2009). Leads the technology behind the Waymo Driver, one of the first commercial robotaxi services. Waymo Drew Bagnell 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and chief scientist of Aurora Innovation and CMU robotics professor specializing in machine learning for self-driving technology. Aurora Innovation Edward Feigenbaum 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Expert Systems Pioneer, Stanford AI Lab Emma Brunskill 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Stanford Reinforcement Learning Research Eric Horvitz 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Microsoft Research Chief Scientific Officer Microsoft AI Ernest Davis 🇺🇸 Research & Academia NYU professor, AI commonsense reasoning expert, Rebooting AI co-author Fei Fang 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Game Theory and AI Security Research Fei-Fei Li 🇺🇸 Research & Academia ImageNet creator World Labs François Fleuret 🇨🇭 Research & Academia Meta FAIR researcher, University of Geneva professor, Little Book of Deep Learning author Gary Marcus 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Criticism, Cognitive Science Robust.AI Geoffrey Hinton 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Godfather of Deep Learning Geordie Rose 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Co-founded Sanctuary AI (general-purpose humanoid robots) after founding quantum computing pioneer D-Wave and AI firm Kindred. Sanctuary AI Ginevra Castellano 🇸🇪 Research & Academia Human-Robot Interaction Research Greg Yang 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Creator of the Tensor Programs framework and Maximal Update Parameterization (muP/muTransfer), which enables hyperparameter transfer from small to very large neural networks. Founding member of xAI (stepped back to informal advisor in early 2026). xAI Herbert A. Simon 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Pioneer, Nobel Prize Winner, Cognitive Science Hiroshi Ishiguro 🇯🇵 Research & Academia Android Robotics, Humanoid Robots Hugo Larochelle 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Google Brain Research, Deep Learning Ian Goodfellow 🇺🇸 Research & Academia GAN inventor Google DeepMind Ilya Sutskever 🇺🇸 Research & Academia OpenAI co-founder - GPT architect OpenAI Jakub Pachocki 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Chief Scientist of OpenAI, succeeding Ilya Sutskever in 2024. Led development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five, and directs OpenAI's frontier research toward an automated AI researcher. OpenAI Jeff Clune 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Research, Evolutionary Algorithms Google DeepMind Jeff Dean 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Google Chief Scientist, TensorFlow, MapReduce Google DeepMind Jeff Hawkins 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Numenta Founder, Brain-Inspired AI Numenta Jesse Levinson 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and CTO of Zoox, Amazon's autonomous robotaxi company; earlier led self-driving research at Stanford. Zoox Jimmy Ba 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Associate professor at the University of Toronto and co-author of the Adam optimizer, one of the most widely used and cited methods in deep learning. Co-founded xAI in 2023 (departed early 2026). Jitendra Malik 🇺🇸 Research & Academia UC Berkeley Computer Vision, Object Recognition Meta Superintelligence Labs Joelle Pineau 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Meta AI Research, Reinforcement Learning Cohere John Carmack 🇺🇸 Research & Academia id Software Co-founder, Game Engine Development Keen Technologies John Ha 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Founded Bear Robotics, maker of autonomous serving and delivery robots for hospitality. Bear Robotics John Jumper 🇺🇸 Research & Academia DeepMind AlphaFold lead Google DeepMind John McCarthy 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Pioneer, Coined 'Artificial Intelligence', LISP Creator John Schulman 🇺🇸 Research & Academia OpenAI Research, PPO Algorithm, RLHF OpenAI Jonathan Hurst 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founded Agility Robotics, maker of the bipedal humanoid robot Digit. Agility Robotics Josh Tenenbaum 🇺🇸 Research & Academia MIT professor Judea Pearl 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Causal Inference, Bayesian Networks, Turing Award Winner Jürgen Schmidhuber 🇨🇭 Research & Academia LSTM Co-inventor, Neural Network Pioneer Justin Johnson 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Computer vision researcher who co-created Stanford's CS231n deep learning course in 2015 with Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy. Co-founded spatial-intelligence company World Labs. World Labs Kaiming He 🇺🇸 Research & Academia ResNet Creator, Computer Vision Research Karol Hausman 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence, building general-purpose foundation models for robots. Previously a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind/Google Brain focused on robot learning. Physical Intelligence Kate Crawford 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Ethics Research, Atlas of AI Kate Devlin 🇬🇧 Research & Academia Human-Robot Interaction, AI Ethics Kirk Borne 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Data Science Education, AI Advocacy DataPrime, Inc. Koray Kavukcuoglu 🇬🇧 Research & Academia CTO of Google DeepMind and, since June 2025, Google's first Chief AI Architect, leading development of Gemini and generative AI across Google's products. Co-author of the landmark DQN Atari, AlphaGo and WaveNet papers. Google DeepMind Kristen DiCerbo 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Educational AI, Learning Analytics Kyle Vogt 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and former CEO of self-driving company Cruise, and co-founder of Twitch. Cruise Kyogu Lee 🇰🇷 Research & Academia Audio AI Research, Music Technology Supertone Lachy Groom Research & Academia Co-founded Physical Intelligence, a company building general-purpose foundation models for robotics. Physical Intelligence Leslie Valiant 🇺🇸 Research & Academia PAC Learning Theory, Turing Award Winner Lotfi Zadeh 🇮🇷 Research & Academia Fuzzy logic pioneer, fuzzy set theory creator Manuela Veloso 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Multi-agent systems, robot soccer, AI planning Marc Raibert 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Boston Dynamics founder, legged robotics pioneer Boston Dynamics Mark Chen 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Chief Research Officer of OpenAI. Architect of DALL-E, Codex and the o1 reasoning models, co-leading OpenAI's research division alongside Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki. OpenAI Marvin Minsky 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Pioneer, MIT AI Lab Co-founder, Cognitive Science Max Bennett 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI entrepreneur, A Brief History of Intelligence author Alby Melanie Mitchell 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Research, Complexity Science, AI Criticism Meredith Broussard 🇺🇸 Research & Academia AI Criticism, Algorithmic Accountability Michael I. Jordan 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Machine Learning Pioneer, Statistical Learning Mikhail Jones 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founded Agility Robotics, maker of the bipedal humanoid robot Digit. Agility Robotics Nick Paine 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founded Apptronik, developer of the Apollo humanoid robot, serving as its technical lead. Apptronik Noam Brown 🇺🇸 Research & Academia VP of Research at OpenAI and a foundational contributor to the o1/o3 reasoning models. Previously created the poker AIs Libratus and Pluribus and the Diplomacy AI CICERO. OpenAI Olivia Norton 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Co-founded Sanctuary AI, which develops humanoid robots aimed at general-purpose physical labor. Sanctuary AI Oren Etzioni 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Allen Institute for AI CEO, AI Research Allen Institute for AI (AI2) Oriol Vinyals 🇬🇧 Research & Academia VP of Research at Google DeepMind and co-technical lead of Gemini. Pioneered sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) learning and led AlphaStar, contributing to core work behind modern multimodal AI models. Google DeepMind Percy Liang 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Stanford HAI director Together AI Peter Chen 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder and CEO of Covariant, building AI models for robotic manipulation; previously a researcher at OpenAI. Covariant Pieter Abbeel 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Covariant co-founder Covariant Pushmeet Kohli 🇬🇧 Research & Academia VP of Research at Google DeepMind, founding and leading the AI for Science unit behind Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold, plus AlphaProof, AlphaGenome, AlphaEvolve and more. Also Chief Scientist of Google Cloud. Google DeepMind Raj Reddy 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Speech Recognition Pioneer, Turing Award Winner Rana el Kaliouby 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Affectiva Co-founder, Emotion AI Pioneer Regina Barzilay 🇺🇸 Research & Academia NLP for healthcare, cancer treatment AI research Richard Socher 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Natural language processing, Salesforce AI research You.com Richard Sutton 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Reinforcement Learning Pioneer, Temporal Difference Learning Keen Technologies Rocky Duan Research & Academia Medeoprichter van Covariant, dat AI-modellen ontwikkelt voor robotmanipulatie in magazijnen. Covariant Rodney Brooks 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Behavior-Based Robotics, iRobot Co-founder Robust.AI Ruslan Salakhutdinov 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Deep learning research, CMU professor, Apple AI director Safiya Noble 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Algorithmic Bias Research, Digital Discrimination Sam McCandlish 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder of Anthropic and former Head of Research Engineering. Theoretical physicist who worked on scaling laws for AI systems and drives the company's research direction. Anthropic Samir Menon 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Founded Dexterity, developing AI-powered robots for warehouse and logistics manipulation tasks. Dexterity Sebastian Ruder 🇩🇪 Research & Academia NLP Research, Transfer Learning Cohere Sepp Hochreiter 🇦🇹 Research & Academia LSTM Co-inventor, Deep Learning Pioneer NXAI Sergey Levine 🇺🇸 Research & Academia UC Berkeley professor Physical Intelligence Shengjia Zhao 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Chief Scientist and co-founder of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Previously at OpenAI, where he contributed to ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the o1 reasoning model. Meta Superintelligence Labs Shunyu Yao 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Chief AI Scientist at Tencent (Hunyuan); creator of the ReAct and Tree of Thoughts agent paradigms and the SWE-bench coding benchmark; ex-OpenAI (Deep Research, Operator). Tencent Hunyuan Suzanne Gildert 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Co-founded Sanctuary AI to build general-purpose humanoid robots; a physicist previously at D-Wave Systems and co-founder of Kindred. Sanctuary AI Tang Jie 🇨🇳 Research & Academia Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Zhipu AI and Tsinghua professor; architect of the GLM / ChatGLM model family and creator of the AMiner academic network. Zhipu AI (Z.ai, GLM) Tang Xiao’ou 🇨🇳 Research & Academia SenseTime founder, computer vision research pioneer SenseTime Tianhao Zhang 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founded Covariant, a startup applying deep reinforcement learning to warehouse robot manipulation. Covariant Tim Kentley-Klay 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Co-founder of Zoox, the autonomous robotaxi company later acquired by Amazon. Zoox Tom M. Mitchell 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Machine Learning Pioneer, CMU AI Research Vincent Granville 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Data Science Education, Machine Learning Vladimir Vapnik 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Support Vector Machines, Statistical Learning Theory Yann Dauphin 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Meta AI Research, Deep Learning Yann LeCun 🇫🇷 Research & Academia Convolutional Neural Networks Meta Superintelligence Labs Yoav Shoham 🇮🇱 Research & Academia Stanford AI Research, AI Index AI21 Labs Yonghui Wu 🇺🇸 Research & Academia Head of foundational research at ByteDance Seed (Doubao); former VP at Google DeepMind on Gemini and Google Neural Machine Translation. ByteDance Seed Yoshua Bengio 🇨🇦 Research & Academia Deep Learning pioneer Zhou Jingren 🇨🇳 Research & Academia CTO of Alibaba Cloud; leads the Tongyi Lab and the development of the Qwen large language model family. Alibaba Qwen