Gilles Brassard is a Professor at the Université de Montréal. He laid the foundations of quantum cryptography at a time when only a handful of people worldwide were interested in quantum information processing. Quantum cryptography makes it possible to communicate in perfect secrecy with no need to establish a shared secret key. Among his many other achievements are the invention of privacy amplification, quantum teleportation, quantum entanglement distillation, and amplitude amplification.

Hector Garcia-Molina is a pioneer and one of the leading researchers in the fields of distributed computing and information systems, largely impacting the foundations of the whole discipline of computer science. In the 1980s, he studied transactional models for distributed information systems, devised ways to implement transactional properties in a distributed system, and proposed consistency models for replicated data. Another area for which he made fundamental contributions is the field of data integration. He devised the state-of-the-art framework for entity resolution. Recently, Garcia-Molina has worked on Internet technologies. His group developed the first systems to detect Spam on the Internet in various form.

Donald Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms. He is best known as the author of the multi-volume “The Art of Computer Programming”, the earliest and one of the most highly respected references in computer science. Knuth systematized formal mathematical techniques for algorithms analysis, shaped the field of rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms, and made many seminal contributions to several branches of theoretical computer science. In addition to his fundamental theoretical contributions, Knuth is the creator of the well-known TeX computer typesetting system. He was awarded the singular academic title of Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming. In 1971, Knuth was the recipient of the first ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. He has received various other awards including the ACM Turing Award in 1974.

Richard Karp’s research activities center around the theory of algorithms including the development of efficient algorithms for network flow and other combinatorial optimization problems, the identification of polynomial-time computability with the intuitive notion of algorithmic efficiency, and, most notably, contributions to the theory of NP-completeness. Beyond that, he has shaped directions such as parallel algorithms, probabilistic analysis of algorithms, and randomized algorithms. Richard Karp has made very significant contributions in the field for which he received the Turing Award in 1985.

Vinton Gray Cerf is widely recognized as one of "the fathers of the internet", sharing this title with Robert E. Kahn. Both invented jointly the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the common computer language that gave birth to the internet. In the early days, Cerf was a program manager for the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding various groups to develop TCP/IP technology. When the Internet began to transition to a commercial opportunity during the late 1980s, he moved to MCI Worldcom, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services, he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial e-mail service to be connected to the Internet. From 2000–2007, Cerf was chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Since 2010, Cerf has served as a Commissioner for the Broadband Commission for Digital Development, a UN body which aims to make broadband internet technologies more widely available.His work and contributions was acknowledged and lauded, repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the Turing Award (with Robert Kahn, 2004), the Charles Stark Draper award of the National Academy of Engineering, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the ACM Software System Award. In 1997, President Bill Clinton presented Cerf and Kahn with the National Medal of Technology in recognition of their pioneering work. In 2005, President George Bush awarded both with the highest civilian honor in the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Christos Harilaos Papadimitriou is one of the leading international experts in the field of theoretical computer science. His books, “Elements of the Theory of Computation”, “Computational Complexity” and “Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity”, are today the standard textbooks in their areas. He also delved into other topics like the economics of the programming market, the mysterious complexity of the Web or quantum computing. In addition to his scientific pursuits, Papadimitriou wrote a novel, “Turing”, which is both a romance and a history of ideas in computer science. He is also one of the authors of “Logicomix”, a graphical novel which tells the story of the early-20th-century search for a logical foundation for mathematics. For his groundbreaking work in computational complexity and algorithmic game theory, Papadimitriou was awarded numerous distinctions, among them the Knuth Prize and Charles Babbage Prize. He was inducted as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Konrad Zuse (1910–1995) had no background in electronics, but he designed and built the first computers. He majored in civil engineering in college and went to work at the Henschel Aviation Company. Tired of repeating calculation procedures he built a first mechanical calculator: the Z1 (1938), the first computer. It was a binary calculating machine which featured separated memory storage and program control to perform floating-point arithmetic, with a memory capacity of 64 words, each comprising 22 bits. “You could say that I was too lazy to calculate”, Zuse later said, “and so I invented the computer”. His second machine, the Z2, used 800 discarded phone relay devices as arithmetic and control units, but was never finished, as Zuse was drafted into the German Army. Completed in 1941, Zuse's Z3 was about the size of two small trucks standing on end, and structured much like a modern computer, with a control unit and input/output devices. It was the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. During the last days of war the next model Z4 was transported under adventurous circumstances via truck and horse-drawn cart from Berlin to Goettingen and then to the Allgaeu. Hidden in a stable, it remained undiscovered by the war parties. In 1945/46, Konrad Zuse accomplished another extraordinary achievement: He created “Plankalkuel” (plan calculus), the first algorithmic programming language. Zuse was also the first programmer dedicated to put this or any language to practical benefits, e.g. design a chess game. In 1946, he started his own business to manufacture his computers, and leased in 1950 a Z4 to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Capable of running advanced scientific applications involving up to 1000 instructions per hour, it was the only operational computer in Europe.

Currently, Butler Lampson is an Adjunct Professor Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT and a Technical Fellow at Microsoft Research working on security, privacy, and fault-tolerance, and kibitzing in systems, networking, and other areas. Lampson was one of the founding members of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970. His now famous vision of a personal computer was captured in the 1972 memo entitled "Why Alto?". In 1973, the Xerox Alto, with its three-button mouse and full-page-sized monitor was born. He received the ACM Software Systems Award in 1984 for his work on the Alto and the IEEE Computer Pioneer award in 1996. Butler Lampson was honored in 1992, with the Turing Award for “contributions to the development of distributed, personal computing environments and the technology for their implementation: workstations, networks, operating systems, programming systems, displays, security and document publishing.”

Ambros Speiser (1922–2003) was one of the last of the early pioneers of digital computer design and an insightful initiator and staunch supporter of scientific research. He was the leading hardware designer for the construction of the legendary ERMETH computer built at ETH between 1950 and 1955 – a period when Konrad Zuse's Z4 was used at ETH as the first digital computer at a continental European university. In 1956, well aware of Speiser’s talents, IBM chose him to build up, establish and lead its Zurich Research laboratory. Soon after, BBC (Brown Boveri & Company, now ABB) asked him to found and direct its corporate research laboratory in Baden (Switzerland). Ambros Speiser fulfilled this assignment until his retirement in 1987. In his lifetime he was not only a researcher with the highest aspirations, but also – particularly when he retired – one of the most articulate and respected scientific journalist.