All Computing Methodologies

Pioneers whose defining contribution is a technique for making a computer perform a task that, done by a person, would be called intelligent, expressive or perceptive: reasoning, learning from data, understanding language, interpreting images, generating graphics or operating a robot, the span the ACM Computing Classification System groups as Computing Methodologies. This folds together six earlier pioneer fields: Artificial Intelligence (John McCarthy, who coined the term; Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon's Logic Theorist), Machine Learning (Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio's deep learning work; Vladimir Vapnik's statistical learning theory), Computer Graphics (Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad; Edwin Catmull's rendering work behind Pixar), Natural Language Processing (Terry Winograd's early language understanding systems), Robotics (George Devol's Unimate, the first programmable industrial robot arm; Sebastian Thrun's self driving car research) and Computer Vision (Larry Roberts's 1963 thesis on machine perception; Fei-Fei Li's ImageNet). Does not belong here: a pioneer whose defining work is organizing stored data for retrieval rather than reasoning over it, filed under Information Systems instead.