Who's the most influential biomedical scientist? Computer program guided by artificial intelligence says it knows

Eric Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute and a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is the most influential biomedical researcher of the modern era, according to a computer program. Lander, a geneticist and mathematician, ranks first on a new list of top biomedical researchers produced by the scientific literature search tool Semantic Scholar. Semantic Scholar, launched in 2015, is an academic search engine aiming to tackle the problem of information overload. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help users sift through huge numbers of scientific papers and understand (to a limited extent) their content. The free tool was developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), a nonprofit based in Seattle, Washington, that was co-founded in 2014 by Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen.