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Top 100 AI Experts Globally (2025)

Artificial intelligence has been driven forward by visionary researchers and industry leaders across the world. Below we present 100 of the most renowned and highly qualified AI experts – primarily from the United States and China, with other global standouts – categorized by their roles in academia and industry. Each expert’s current affiliation, key contributions, awards, and leadership roles are highlighted, along with links to notable profiles or publications. This list prioritizes publication record, citation impact, public influence, major awards (e.g. Turing Award), and leadership in AI initiatives, as specified.

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Academic & Research Luminaries in AI

These individuals are leading academics and researchers who have made foundational contributions in machine learning (ML), deep learning (especially large neural networks and LLMs), computer vision, robotics, algorithms, and related areas. Many have extensive publication records and citation impact, and several are Turing Award laureates or fellows of prestigious organizations:

  • Yoshua Bengio – Professor at Univ. of Montreal (Mila Institute). Pioneer of deep learning, co-developed neural network training algorithms and high-dimensional word embeddings. Co-recipient of the 2018 Turing Award (with Hinton and LeCun) for breakthroughs in deep neural networks. Over 680k citations; h-index ~223. Co-author of the book “Deep Learning”. Fellow of ACM/AAAI and Officer of the Order of Canada. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Geoffrey Hinton – Emeritus Prof. at Univ. of Toronto; former VP Engineering at Google. “Godfather” of deep learning who introduced backpropagation and Boltzmann machines. Co-recipient of 2018 Turing Award; also a Fellow of the Royal Society. Pioneered neural networks for speech and vision (e.g. first deep CNN for ImageNet). Over 930k citations. Now focused on AI safety research. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Yann LeCun – Professor at NYU & Chief AI Scientist at Meta (Facebook) AI Research. Inventor of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image recognition (LeNet) and a leader in self-supervised learning. Turing Award 2018 laureate. Former director of Facebook AI Research (FAIR). ~290k citations. Advocate for open-source AI (launched open LLaMA models). (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Michael I. Jordan – Professor at UC Berkeley. A foundational figure in machine learning and statistics, known for latent Dirichlet allocation, variational inference, and Bayesian networks. Often cited as one of the most influential computer scientists. H-index ~197; >266k citations. Member of NAS/NAE. Winner of the IJCAI Research Excellence Award. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Andrew Y. Ng – Adjunct Professor at Stanford; Co-Chairman of Coursera; CEO of Landing AI. Led the Google Brain project (co-founder and first head of Google’s deep learning team) and former Chief Scientist of Baidu AI. Co-founder of Coursera (MOOC platform). Renowned for democratizing AI education (his ML course taught to >4 million people). H-index ~136; ~200k citations. IJCAI Computers & Thought Award winner; Time 100 AI 2023 honoree. (Profile: Stanford HAI)

  • Andrew Zisserman – Professor at University of Oxford (DeepMind). Leading computer vision researcher; co-developed breakthroughs like the SIFT features and multiple-view geometry. H-index ~197; ~392k citations. Won the 2017 IEEE CVPR Longuet-Higgins Prize and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Anil K. Jain – University Distinguished Prof. at Michigan State University. Biometrics and pattern recognition pioneer (fingerprint recognition, face recognition). Among the world’s most cited computer scientists (h-index 214). Member of NAE. Received the 2021 IEEE ICPR Award for his contributions to biometric identification. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Jiawei Han – Professor at UIUC. Data mining and knowledge discovery authority, author of a leading textbook. Known for concepts like frequent pattern mining and graph mining. D-index 197. ACM Fellow, received 2011 IEEE W. Wallace McDowell Award. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Luc Van Gool – Professor at ETH Zurich and KU Leuven. Computer vision expert known for work in 3D object recognition and autonomous driving. D-index 191; ~215k citations. Co-founder of the computer vision startup kooaba. IEEE Fellow and recipient of the 2018 3DV Helmholtz Prize. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Bernhard Schölkopf – Director, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Germany). Leader in kernel methods and causality in AI. Co-inventor of the support vector machine (SVM) framework for ML. D-index 180; ~228k citations. Winner of the 2018 ACM Kanellakis Award for kernel PCA. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Jitendra Malik – Professor at UC Berkeley. Computer vision pioneer who developed contour detection and segmentation algorithms (e.g. normalized cuts). Winner of the 2016 IEEE PAMI Azriel Rosenfeld Award. D-index 167; ~223k citations. Member of the National Academy of Sciences. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Takeo Kanade – Prof. Emeritus at CMU. Robotics and vision legend, known for the Kanade–Lucas–Tomasi (KLT) tracking algorithm and autonomous vehicle research (NavLab). H-index ~170. Winner of the 2008 IEEE Robotics Pioneer Award. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Trevor Darrell – Professor at UC Berkeley (and co-director of BAIR). Expert in computer vision and deep learning, known for visual recognition and multimodal machine learning. D-index 168; ~243k citations. Co-founded the startup DeepSight. IEEE Fellow. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Sebastian Thrun – Adjunct Professor at Stanford; co-founder of Udacity. Robotics and self-driving car pioneer – led Stanford’s team to win the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Co-inventor of SLAM for robotics. D-index 166. Founded Google X and led development of Google’s autonomous car. ACM Fellow; winner of the Max Planck Research Award. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Eric Horvitz – Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft; Technical Fellow. AI pioneer in probabilistic reasoning, contributions to AI in healthcare and decision-making under uncertainty. Former president of AAAI. D-index 159. Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Winner of the 2021 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award. (Profile: Microsoft Research)

  • Christopher D. Manning – Professor at Stanford University. Leader in natural language processing (NLP); co-author of the seminal NLP textbook. Developed foundational work in dependency parsing and word embeddings. D-index 155; ~220k citations. ACM Fellow. His team created the well-known GloVe embeddings. (Profile: Stanford NLP)

  • Cordelia Schmid – Research Director at INRIA (France). Computer vision researcher known for foundational work in local feature descriptors and visual object recognition. D-index 154; ~154k citations. Winner of the 2012 ACM Helmholtz Prize and 2020 IEEE PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Pieter Abbeel – Professor at UC Berkeley; co-founder of Covariant. Robotics and deep reinforcement learning expert – pioneered apprenticeship learning for robotics and deep RL for control. D-index 154; ~134k citations. Co-director of Berkeley AI Research (BAIR). Won the 2017 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Sergey Levine – Associate Professor at UC Berkeley. Leader in robotic learning and reinforcement learning, known for work on end-to-end training for robotic control and offline RL. D-index 152; ~120k citations. Co-founder of the RoboImitation Learning framework. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Richard S. Sutton – Professor at Univ. of Alberta; Chief Scientific Advisor, DeepMind Alberta. Reinforcement learning (RL) pioneer – co-author of “Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction” and inventor of temporal-difference learning algorithms. His work underpins modern RL. Fellow of AAAI and Royal Society of Canada. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Judea Pearl – Professor Emeritus at UCLA. Inventor of Bayesian Networks and causal inference methods – fundamentally changed how AI handles uncertainty and causality. Turing Award 2011 “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.”. Member of NAS. (Profile: Turing Award site)

  • Leslie Valiant – Professor at Harvard. A theoretical computer scientist whose work laid the foundations of computational learning theory – introduced the PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) learning model. Turing Award 2010 for his transformative contributions to machine learning theory. Fellow of AAAI and Royal Society. (Profile: Turing citation)

  • Stuart J. Russell – Professor at UC Berkeley. Authority in AI theory and ethics, co-author of the standard textbook “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.” Known for contributions to planning and inverse reinforcement learning. Leads research in AI safety and was co-founder of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. AAAI Feigenbaum Prize recipient (2022). (Profile: CAIS)

  • Raj Reddy – Professor at CMU. AI pioneer in speech recognition and robotics, co-founded CMU’s Robotics Institute. Turing Award 1994 for contributions to human–computer interaction and AI. Developed early speech understanding systems (Hearsay-II). First person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award. (Profile: ACM Turing)

  • Peter Norvig – Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford HAI; former Director of Research at Google. Co-author of the leading AI textbook with Stuart Russell. Pioneered internet-scale data mining and search algorithms at Google (Authored “Paradigms of AI Programming”). AAAI Fellow. (Profile: Stanford HAI)

  • Daphne Koller – CEO of Insitro; Adjunct Professor at Stanford. Machine learning and computational biology expert. Co-founder of Coursera (with Andrew Ng). Her research on probabilistic graphical models earned the 2008 ACM-Infosys Award. MacArthur Fellow. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Fei-Fei Li – Professor at Stanford; Co-Director of Stanford HAI. Leader in computer vision – led creation of ImageNet, the dataset that catalyzed deep learning’s success in vision. Former Chief Scientist of AI at Google Cloud. Fellow of ACM and member of NAS. Advocate for diversity in AI (co-founded AI4ALL). Authored 300+ papers. (Profile: Stanford/AI4ALL)

  • Regina Barzilay – Professor at MIT CSAIL. NLP and machine learning researcher, known for work on text summarization and AI for healthcare (developed ML models for cancer diagnosis). MacArthur Fellowship (2017). AAAI Fellow. Winner of the 2020 ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award for contributions to NLP. (Profile: MIT CSAIL)

  • Zoubin Ghahramani – Professor at University of Cambridge; VP of Research at Google (Brain team). Bayesian ML and probabilistic modeling authority, known for Bayesian nonparametrics and Gaussian processes. Fellow of the Royal Society. Co-winner of the 2013 ISBA Mitchell Prize. As Google AI VP, he oversees cutting-edge research in generative models. (Profile: Google AI)

  • Terrence J. Sejnowski – Professor at UC San Diego (Salk Institute). Neuroscientist and AI pioneer who co-invented the Boltzmann Machine with Hinton. His work bridges biological and artificial neural networks. Winner of the 2022 Gruber Neuroscience Prize. Fellow of AAAI and member of NAS. (Profile: Salk Bio)

  • Tomaso Poggio – Professor at MIT; Director of the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. Computational neuroscience and AI theorist, known for work on vision, regularization theory, and 3D object recognition. Winner of the 2015 Swartz Prize in Theoretical Neuroscience. Member of NAS. (Profile: MIT CBMM)

  • Jürgen Schmidhuber – Scientific Director, IDSIA (Switzerland). Co-inventor of the LSTM neural network (with Hochreiter), a breakthrough for sequential data. Prominent in artificial general intelligence (AGI) discourse. Often credited as a father of modern deep learning, with work dating to the 1990s. Recipient of the 2022 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence. (Profile: Schmidhuber Site)

  • Sepp Hochreiter – Professor at JKU Linz (Austria). Co-inventor of LSTM networks, foundational for speech recognition and NLP. Leading researcher in bioinformatics and deep learning. Received the 2021 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Oren Etzioni – CEO (emeritus) of Allen Institute for AI (AI2); Professor emeritus at University of Washington. Natural language understanding and web mining expert – built the first shopping comparison agent (ShopBot) and Open IE systems. AAAI Fellow. Led AI2 in creating influential NLP tools (like Semantic Scholar). (Profile: AI2)

  • Ian Goodfellow – Co-founder of Partially Derivative; previously at OpenAI and Google. Inventor of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a milestone in generative modeling. Co-author of the textbook “Deep Learning.” Over 100k citations. Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science (2016). (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • David Silver – Principal Research Scientist at DeepMind; Professor at UCL. Reinforcement learning leader who led the team behind AlphaGo, the first program to defeat a Go world champion. Co-inventor of the AlphaZero algorithm for generalized game playing. Received the 2019 ACM Prize in Computing for breakthroughs in RL. (Profile: DeepMind)

  • Ilya Sutskever – Co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI. Deep learning pioneer – co-developed AlexNet (first CNN to win ImageNet, sparking the deep learning revolution) and sequence-to-sequence LSTM for machine translation. H-index ~68; >270k citations. Key architect of GPT-3 and ChatGPT. (Profile: OpenAI)

  • Dacheng Tao – Professor at University of Sydney (formerly at UT Sydney and now Chief Scientist, JD.com). Expert in computer vision and multimodal deep learning; known for tensor analysis and dimensionality reduction techniques. D-index 166; ~110k citations. Winner of the 2020 IEEE TPAMI Young Researcher Award. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Klaus-Robert Müller – Professor at TU Berlin (and at KAIST). Machine learning and signal processing scholar, notable for support vector machines and brain-computer interfaces. D-index 161; ~131k citations. Elected to the German National Academy of Sciences. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Dawn Song – Professor at UC Berkeley. Computer security and deep learning researcher, working on AI safety, program synthesis, and blockchain-based AI. MacArthur Fellow (2010). Has over 100 publications on topics from adversarial ML to smart contracts. Co-founder of Oasis Labs (privacy-preserving AI startup). (Profile: Berkeley)

  • Isabelle Guyon – Professor at Université Paris-Saclay. Machine learning pioneer, co-developed the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm and first author of the seminal 1992 paper on SVM for handwriting recognition. Also an expert in feature selection (introduced “RankNet”). Co-founder of the ChaLearn challenges on AutoML. IEEE Fellow. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Ashish Vaswani – Cofounder of Adept AI; formerly at Google Brain. Lead author of the 2017 paper “Attention is All You Need”, which introduced the Transformer architecture that underpins modern LLMs. This work (with over 50k citations) revolutionized NLP and enabled models like GPT. Now working on AI that can act through APIs. (Notable Paper: Attention Is All You Need, NeurIPS 2017)

  • Jure Leskovec – Professor at Stanford; Chief Scientist at Pinterest (former). Expert in graph mining and social network analysis, known for the PageRank algorithm’s follow-ups and work on network cascades. D-index 133; ~92k citations. Co-authored influential studies on information diffusion in networks. ACM Fellow (2022). (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland – Professor at MIT Media Lab. Data science and social AI pioneer, known for wearable computing (“reality mining”) and computational social science. Developed early AI systems for smart cities and finance. H-index ~148; ~137k citations. Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. (Profile: MIT Media Lab)

  • Ming-Hsuan Yang – Professor at UC Merced. Computer vision researcher specializing in object tracking, face recognition, and image super-resolution. Co-developer of the Kernighan-Lin tracking algorithm. D-index 153; ~118k citations. IEEE Fellow. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Amnon Shashua – Professor at Hebrew University; Co-founder & CEO of Mobileye. Computer vision and AI entrepreneur who developed vision-based Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) for self-driving cars. Mobileye’s success led to a $15B Intel acquisition. Also co-founder of AI21 Labs (NLP startup). Over 100k citations. Recipient of Israel Prize (2019) for technological innovation. (Profile: Hebrew U)

  • Noam Shazeer – Co-founder & CEO of Character.AI; former Google Brain researcher. Co-inventor of the Transformer architecture (as a co-author of “Attention is All You Need”) and of Google’s Mixture-of-Experts deep models. Key contributor to Google’s TensorFlow and GPT-like models. Now building large language model chatbots at Character.AI. (Notable Paper: Attention Is All You Need, 2017)

  • Barbara J. Grosz – Professor Emerita at Harvard. AI pioneer in natural language dialogue and multi-agent systems, known for foundational work on computational modeling of discourse and collaboration. First female president of AAAI. Winner of the 2015 IJCAI Research Excellence Award for trailblazing contributions to AI. Member of the American Philosophical Society. (Profile: Harvard)

  • Dan Jurafsky – Professor at Stanford. Renowned NLP researcher, co-author of the popular textbook “Speech and Language Processing.” Contributions to speech recognition, semantic parsing, and computational linguistics. MacArthur Fellow (2002). His work on machine understanding of semantics earned him ACL’s 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award. (Profile: Stanford NLP)

  • Tom M. Mitchell – Professor at CMU. Machine learning pioneer who authored the classic textbook “Machine Learning” (1997). Established the first Machine Learning Dept. at CMU. Research spans concept learning, cognitive neuroscience (fMRI decoding with ML). AAAI Past President. Winner of the 2015 IEEE Kolmogorov Award. (Profile: CMU)

  • Tomas Mikolov – Research Scientist at CIIRC, Prague (formerly Facebook & Google). Inventor of Word2Vec (efficient word embeddings) which revolutionized NLP representation learning. Also contributed to recurrent neural network language models. Word2Vec and related papers have tens of thousands of citations. Received the 2020 NeurIPS Test of Time Award for word embeddings. (Notable Work: Word2Vec, 2013)

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Industry & Technology Leaders in AI

This category highlights prominent AI practitioners in industry and tech – CEOs, founders, and tech leaders – who drive AI breakthroughs in the real world. They may not all have extensive publications, but they have translated AI research into impactful products, companies, and public influence. Many have also made significant technical contributions or lead large AI teams:

  • Sam Altman – CEO of OpenAI. Public face of the generative AI revolution – under his leadership OpenAI created GPT-3 and ChatGPT, bringing LLMs to global attention. Former president of Y Combinator, he has been instrumental in shaping AI policy discussions. Featured in TIME 100 AI list 2023. (Profile: OpenAI)

  • Dario Amodei – Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. Former VP of Research at OpenAI, he co-authored the landmark GPT-3 paper. Now leading Anthropic in creating large-scale AI systems (like Claude) with a focus on safety. Previously led safety research (e.g. “Concrete Problems in AI Safety”). PhD in physics from Princeton. (Profile: Anthropic)

  • Jensen Huang – Co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA. Architect of modern AI computing – his company’s GPUs became the backbone of deep learning’s growth. Under Huang, NVIDIA has driven innovations in AI hardware (CUDA libraries, specialized AI chips) and he’s evangelized GPU-accelerated AI globally. One of TIME’s 100 AI influential people (2023). Recipient of the 2022 IEEE Founder’s Medal for AI computing leadership. (Profile: NVIDIA)

  • Jeff Dean – Google Senior Fellow and Chief of Google Research (former lead of Google Brain, now Google DeepMind). Legendary engineer and AI leader at Google, co-designed core infrastructure (MapReduce, BigTable) and then spearheaded Google’s deep learning revolution. Co-author of MapReduce and DistBelief; oversaw projects like TensorFlow and Transformer research. ACM Fellow. (Profile: Google AI)

  • Mustafa Suleyman – Co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI; Co-founder of DeepMind. Key architect of DeepMind’s strategy, he led applied AI projects and organizational development. Now heads Inflection AI, focusing on personal AI assistants. TIME100 AI (2023) honoree. Co-author of “The Coming Wave” (2023) on AI’s future. (Profile: Inflection)

  • John Giannandrea – Senior VP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy at Apple. Former head of Google Search & AI, he led Google’s transition to AI-driven search and personal assistants. At Apple, he oversees Siri and on-device ML. Known for advocating privacy-preserving AI. (Profile: Apple Newsroom)

  • Kai-Fu Lee – Chairman of Sinovation Ventures and President of AI Institute at Sinovation (former Google China head). AI technology veteran bridging US and China – led AI projects at Apple, Microsoft (speech recognition), then Google. Founded Sinovation to fund AI startups in China. Author of “AI Superpowers” (2018). Time 100 (2013) alumnus. (Profile: Sinovation)

  • Harry Shum (Heung-Yeung Shum) – Chairman of Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for AI; Adjunct Professor at Tsinghua; former Executive VP of AI & Research at Microsoft. Drove Microsoft’s AI research (e.g. CNTK toolkit, Xiaoice chatbot). Co-founded MSRA in Beijing. ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow. Now spearheading China’s national AI initiatives. (Profile: Tsinghua University)

  • Andrew Chi-Chih Yao – Dean of Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University. Theoretical computer scientist (Turing Award 2000) now dedicated to nurturing China’s AI talent. Oldest in TIME100 AI 2023. Though known for complexity theory, he established the Yao Class to train elite CS students in AI. Fellow of ACM and NAS. (Profile: Tsinghua IIIS)

  • Tang Xiao’ou – (1958–2023) Professor at CUHK; Co-founder of SenseTime. Computer vision researcher-entrepreneur, known for face recognition algorithms. Founded SenseTime in 2014, which became the world’s most valuable AI startup (valued $4.5B in 2018). SenseTime (Hong Kong) advanced facial recognition and surveillance AI. Tang was an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow. (In Memoriam: Died 2023.)*

  • Zhou Zhihua – Professor at Nanjing University; Dean of School of AI. Leading Chinese ML researcher, known for ensemble learning (Random Forests, Adaboost variations) and weakly supervised learning. Author of the popular textbook “Machine Learning” (2016). First winner of the CCF-ACM Award for AI in China. Fellow of AAAI and IEEE. (Profile: WireChina)

  • Wang Xiaogang – Professor at Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong; co-founder of SenseTime. Top computer vision expert (student of Tang Xiao’ou) who developed cutting-edge face detection and image recognition techniques. Co-founded SenseTime and serves as Chief Scientist; D-index 152. Honored as one of China’s top innovating scientists under 40. (Profile: CUHK)

  • Kaiming He – Research Scientist at Meta AI (FAIR). Computer vision superstar, best known for inventing the Deep Residual Network (ResNet) which drastically improved image recognition (won ICCV 2015 Best Paper; >100k citations). Also created Mask R-CNN for object segmentation. Recognized with the 2019 PAMI Young Researcher Award. (Profile: Google Scholar)

  • Zhou Jingren – CTO of Alibaba Cloud. AI leader in industry, overseeing development of Alibaba’s large language models (e.g. Qwen series). Former Microsoft Research scientist (databases and search). Holds a PhD from Columbia. Driving Alibaba’s cloud AI strategy and open-source AI model releases in China. (Profile: WireChina)

  • Wang Haifeng – CTO of Baidu. NLP expert turned tech leader, pioneered machine translation at Toshiba and later led Baidu’s AI Research. First Chinese president of ACL (2013). Oversees Baidu’s investments in autonomous driving (Apollo) and large models (ERNIE). Winner of the 2020 Wu Wenjun AI Innovation Award (China). (Profile: WireChina)

  • Qiang Yang – Chair Professor at HKUST; Tencent AI Lab’s chief AI officer (former). Leading researcher in transfer learning and federated learning. AAAI Fellow, ACM Fellow. Former President of IJCAI. Won the 2017 ACM KDD Innovation Award for his work unifying knowledge across domains. Co-founder of the Open Federated Learning consortium. (Profile: HKUST)

  • Tang Jie – Professor at Tsinghua; Co-founder of Zhipu.ai (one of China’s “AI Tiger” LLM startups). Expert in social network analysis and AI platforms – created AMiner, a scholarly network mining system. Vice Director of Beijing Academy of AI. Now leading development of Chinese large language models at Zhipu. (Profile: WireChina)

  • Zhou Bowen – Chair Professor at Tsinghua; Head of JD Explore Academy (former President of JD AI Research). Neural network and AI platform specialist, led IBM Watson Group’s AI science team before joining JD.com. Now directs the Shanghai AI Laboratory (a national AI research hub). Committed to advancing China’s fundamental AI research. (Profile: WireChina)

  • Wang Xiaochuan – Founder & CEO of Baichuan AI. Tech entrepreneur who previously founded Sogou (search engine) and now leads one of China’s prominent generative AI startups (Baichuan’s open-source LLM ranked among top Chinese models). TIME100 AI 2023 honoree. Advocate for open-source AI development in China. (Profile: WireChina)

  • James Peng – Co-founder & CEO of Pony.ai. Autonomous driving visionary, started Pony.ai in 2016 to build L4 self-driving cars. Previously led Baidu’s self-driving division. Under his leadership, Pony.ai became a leading robotaxi provider (first to operate fully driverless rides in multiple cities). (Profile: Pony.ai)

  • Kai Yu (Yu Kai) – Founder & CEO of Horizon Robotics. Former Baidu Deep Learning Lab director, he initiated Baidu’s early deep learning research. At Horizon, he’s developing edge-AI chips and software for smart cameras and autonomous vehicles. Horizon is one of China’s top AI chip unicorns. (Profile: Horizon)

  • Li Deng – Chief AI Officer at Citadel; formerly Chief Scientist of AI at Microsoft. Speech recognition and deep learning pioneer – co-authored the first deep neural network for speech that achieved human-level accuracy (at MSR). IEEE Fellow and author of influential works in speech, including the textbook “Deep Learning in Speech Recognition.” Now applying AI in finance. (Profile: IEEE)

  • Manuela Veloso – Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research; Prof. Emerita at CMU. Robotics and multi-agent systems authority, known for planning and the RoboCup soccer robots (she is a former President of the International RoboCup Federation). AAAI Past President. Winner of the 2015 IEEE Robotics Pioneer Award. Now leading AI applications in finance. (Profile: JPMorgan AI)

  • Cynthia Breazeal – Professor at MIT Media Lab; Director of Personal Robots Group. Social robotics pioneer – created some of the first expressive humanoid robots (like Kismet). Leader in human-robot interaction research. Founded Jibo, a consumer social robot startup. Now spearheading AI education initiatives at MIT. (Profile: MIT Media Lab)

  • Daniela Rus – Professor and Director of MIT CSAIL. Robotics and AI innovator, known for work in self-reconfiguring robots, soft robots, and autonomous vehicles. First woman to lead CSAIL. MacArthur Fellow (2002). Pushing the frontiers of combining AI with robotics for material science and biology. (Profile: MIT CSAIL)

  • Joelle Pineau – Professor at McGill; Managing Director of Meta AI Research (FAIR) Labs. Reinforcement learning and dialog systems expert, co-developed algorithms for healthcare decision-making and conversational AI. Now oversees Meta’s fundamental AI research across labs in FAIR. ACL Fellow, CIFAR AI Chair. (Profile: McGill)

  • Yejin Choi – Professor at Univ. of Washington; Senior Research Manager at AI2. NLP and commonsense reasoning leader, pioneered methods for teaching AI common sense and social intelligence (e.g. the ATOMIC commonsense knowledge graph). MacArthur Fellow (2022). Her work on vision-and-language won multiple best paper awards. (Profile: UW NLP)

  • Timnit Gebru – Founder & Executive Director of DAIR (Distributed AI Research Institute). Computer vision researcher and ethical AI advocate, co-authored landmark studies on bias in facial recognition. Former co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team. In 2020, named one of Fortune’s 50 Greatest Leaders. Now spearheads independent AI research focusing on fairness and accountability. (Profile: DAIR)

  • Rodney Brooks – Professor Emeritus at MIT; Co-founder of iRobot and Rethink Robotics. Legend in robotics, known for the behavior-based robotics paradigm (subsumption architecture) and building autonomous robots (Genghis, Roomba vacuum). Former Director of MIT CSAIL. Member of NAE. Continues to influence robotics with his writings on AI’s limits. (Profile: MIT)

  • Marc Raibert – Founder and Chairman, Boston Dynamics. Robotics innovator who built the world’s most advanced legged robots (e.g. BigDog, Atlas). Former CMU/MIT professor who pioneered control algorithms for dynamic balance in robots. His work blurs the line between animal and machine locomotion. Boston Dynamics under Raibert set the standard for agile robotics. (Profile: Boston Dynamics)

  • Hiroshi Ishiguro – Professor at Osaka University; Director of ATR Laboratories (Japan). Humanoid robotics pioneer, famous for creating ultra-realistic androids (geminoids) in his own likeness and others. Explores human–robot interaction and the nature of humanity via robotics. Named by TIME as an innovator in 2007. (Profile: Osaka Univ.)

  • Ray Kurzweil – Director of Engineering at Google; Futurist and inventor. AI visionary known for bold predictions about AI and the Singularity. Developed early OCR, speech recognition, and music synthesis AI systems (Kurzweil Reading Machine). Author of “The Age of Spiritual Machines” and “How to Create a Mind.” National Medal of Technology laureate (1999). (Profile: Kurzweil AI)

  • Eric Xing – Professor at Carnegie Mellon (on leave); President of MBZUAI (UAE). Machine learning researcher (worked on graphical models, feature selection) and entrepreneur – co-founded Petuum Inc. for industrial ML. Now founding president of Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, shaping a new graduate institution for AI research. AAAI Fellow. (Profile: MBZUAI)

  • Francois Chollet – Software Engineer at Google. Creator of Keras, a widely used deep learning library that has enabled countless developers and researchers to build neural networks easily. Also known for research on abstraction in AI (author of the “Measure of Intelligence” paper). His work in democratizing AI tools garnered him a spot in Fast Company’s Most Creative People (2017). (Profile: Keras)

  • Richard Socher – CEO of You.com; former Chief Scientist at Salesforce. NLP researcher who developed the GLoVe word embeddings and dynamic CNNs for sentiment analysis (PhD at Stanford under Manning). Founded MetaMind (acquired by Salesforce). At Salesforce, built the Einstein AI platform. Now leading You.com in building an AI-driven search engine. (Profile: Socher.io)

  • Peter Stone – Professor at UT Austin; Executive Director of Sony AI America. Renowned AI and robotics researcher, specializing in multi-agent systems and robotics (robot soccer). President of the International RoboCup Federation. His algorithms for autonomous vehicles and robot soccer earned multiple best paper awards. Winner of the 2023 ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award. (Profile: UT Austin)

  • Yoav Shoham – Co-founder and Co-CEO of AI21 Labs; Professor Emeritus at Stanford. Leading AI expert in logic, multi-agent systems, and game theory. Fellow of AAAI and ACM. Winner of IJCAI’s Research Excellence Award and the ACM Allen Newell Award. Now heads AI21 Labs, which created the Jurassic-2 large language model and AI writing assistant (Wordtune). (Profile: Stanford Emeritus)

  • Qi Tian – Chief AI Scientist, Huawei Cloud. Prolific computer vision researcher (750+ papers), contributed to image retrieval and multimedia analysis. Former professor at UTSA, then joined Huawei to lead cloud AI research despite U.S. sanctions. IEEE Fellow. Guides Huawei’s development of AI models and chips. (Profile: WireChina)

  • Gary Marcus – Founder of Geometric Intelligence (acquired by Uber); Professor Emeritus at NYU. Cognitive scientist and outspoken AI commentator, known for advocating hybrid, symbol-based approaches to AI. Author of “Rebooting AI” (2019). Though critical of deep learning’s limits, he has influenced public debate on AI safety and reliability. (Profile: NYU)

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