While I was busy playing around with how to do a data visualisation on Twitter’s most influential data scientists, @kdnuggets went and posted this blog post about the exact same subject (dated 2012). But that’s cool, cos it saved me a bit of a job… (although I still need to do the learning exercise anyway, and update it to the list of influencers today, so that project’s still a work in progress).
The Twitter list (2012):
But in the meantime, here’s the list as produced by Gilad Lotan (@gilgul) based on Twitter bios containing relevant keywords (original post here) – the bios shown are taken from current Twitter bios:
• Hilary Mason @hmason (Founder at @FastForwardLabs. Data Scientist in Residence at @accel. Website: www.hilarymason.com)
• John Myles White @johnmyleswhite (Scientist at Facebook and Julia developer. Author of Machine Learning for Hackers and Bandit Algorithms for Website Optimization. Website: www.johnmyleswhite.com)
• Kaggle @kaggle (World’s largest community of data scientists. Compete, collaborate, learn, share your work. Website: www.kaggle.com)
• Pete Skomoroch @peteskomoroch (Startup Co-Founder & CEO. Specialize in machine learning, product design, social computing. Prev. Principal Data Scientist LinkedIn, Now Engineer @AOL, MIT. Website: www.datawrangling.org)
• Ryan Rosario @DataJunkie (Statistics, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Data Scientist/Research Engineer at Riot Games, Ex-Facebook. Website: www.bytemining.com)
• DJ Patil @dpatil (formerly LinkedIn, now Greylock)
• Ben Lorica @bigdata (Chief Data Scientist at OReillyMedia. Website: www.gradientflow.com)
• Olivier Grisel @ogrisel (Datageek, engineer @Parietal_INRIA, contributor to scikit-learn. Python, NumPy, Spark. Interested in Machine Learning, NLProc. Website: www.ogrisel.com)
• Gregory Piatetsky @kdnuggets (KDnuggets President, #Analytics, #BigData, #DataMining, #DataScience expert, KDD & SIGKDD co-founder, was Chief Scientist at 2 startups. Website: www.kdnuggets.com)
• David Smith @revodavid (Blogger and R Community Lead at Microsoft, Formerly of Revolution Analytics. Website: www.blog.revolutionanalytics.com)
A human’s list (2012/13):
While the above list only showed those data scientists with a Twitter account and describing themselves as a data scientist in their bio, hence incomplete, the following list came from an answer given on Quora by Ferenc Huszár, data scientist at PeerIndex and Cambridge PhD student (as mentioned in the kdnuggets post):
IN INDUSTRY:
• Hilary Mason @hmason (as above)
• Dj Patil @dpatil (as above)
• Jeff Hammerbacher @hackingdata (Cloudera, previously Facebook Data Team. Quora Profile)
• Peter Skomoroch @peteskomoroch (as above)
• Drew Conway @drewconway (NYU Data nerd, hacker, @alluvium founder and CEO. Website: www.drewconway.com)
• Olivier Grisel @ogrisel (as above)
• Amy Heineike (Director of Mathematics @Quid)
• Gregory Piatetsky @kdnuggets (as above)
• Andreas Weigend (former chief scientist at Amazon, now Stanford. Quora Profile)
• Tim O’Reilly (not a data scientist, but very important influencer in the area. Quora Post)
• Andrew Ng (Coursera and Stanford. Wikipedia Entry)
SCIENTISTS/ACADEMICS:
• Vladimir Vapnik (support vector machines, VC-theory. Wikipedia Entry)
• Geoffrey Hinton (neural networks, back-propagation, deep learning. Wikipedia Entry)
• Peter Norvig (currently Director of Research at Google. Wikipedia Entry)
• Tom M. Mitchell (machine learning, artificial intelligence. Wikipedia Entry)
+ former students, including Zoubin Ghahramani (Wikipedia Entry), Michael I. Jordan (Wikipedia Entry), Bernhard Schölkopf (Wikipedia Entry)