Thank you for organising this great initiative!
First, on a personal note, I’d like to nominee Adam Gibson (AdamISZ (Adam Gibson) · GitHub) who has written extensively on many cryptography topics and has authored lots of privacy preserving software. His writings have taught me and others a lot.
I’ve also been wanting to do the following for a while: parsing the list of all authors from eprint.iacr.org. My preliminary additional nominees are the people who co-authored most papers:
- Amit Sahai - 146 papers
- Rafail Ostrovsky 126 papers
- Brent Waters 124 papers
I’d be keen to see extensions which (1) rank the authors by citation count of their work, which is easily accessible via Google Scholar (2) discounting by age of the work to promote newcomers (3) also following this approach for privacy preserving software authors by scraping Github data.