10 data science and big data experts to follow on Twitter

Industry   |   
Published February 25, 2016   |   

Twitter is a great source of information, and lets you quickly scan your feed and engage with content that intrigues you. Even though this eliminates a lot of unnecessary noise, you need to follow the right people, if you are on a constant lookout for great information.
In no particular order, here are 10 data science and big data experts to follow on Twitter.
1) Bernard Marr
Bernard Marr
Bernard Marr is a best-selling business author, speaker, and consultant in the big data analytics space. He is one of the world’s highly respected voices, when it comes to data in business. Bernard is a regular contributor to the World Economic Forum, has been acknowledged by the CEO Journal as one of the leading business brains, and by LinkedIn as one of the World’s top five Influencers of 2015.
He is also a regular contributor to Forbes, LinkedIn Pulse, DataInformed, Hiscox, Data Science Central and Smart Data Collective.
I personally like his article ‘How big data is transforming medicine’.
2) Andrew Ng
Andrew Ng
Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University. Ng’s Machine Learning course on Coursera has more than a million subscribers. He is passionate about Deep Learning, so most of his tweets are to do with machine learning and robotics.
His GPU tech conference that talks about the “new speech demo technology” is very interesting; data science enthusiasts, do watch his talk!: UStream.
3) Kirk Borne
Kirk Borne
Kirk has built an impressive following of over 60,500 followers in his lengthy big data career. He is super active on Twitter, and most of his tweets are about big data, machine learning, and data science. A hat tip to Kirk and to his superior depth of knowledge on big data, as well as his generosity in giving it away.
Kirk has also delivered a comprehensive Ted talk on big data called ‘Big Data, Small World’.
4) Monica Rogati
Monica Rogati
At Jawbone, she built and led a team of professionals who developed innovative health care data products.
Before Jaw bone, Monica was one of the early members of LinkedIn’s data science team, where she developed and improved LinkedIn’s key data products. In 2014, she was named as one of the most creative people in the business by Fast Company.
I like the following quote from her article, ‘The rise of the data natives’:
“While digital natives were most concerned with what they can do with technology, data natives are more concerned about what that technology can do for them.”
5) Hilary Mason – Founder at Fast Forward Labs
 
Hilary Mason
Before Hilary Mason founded Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company, she was Chief Scientist at Bitly. She also co-founded HackNY, co-host DataGotham, and she is a member of NYCResistor.
When I joined Crayon Data, I was very curious about the term “Data Science”. Her article on Forbes, clearly explains the concept of “Data Science.”
6) Gregory Piatetsky – Shapiro
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Gregory is the President of KDnuggets, a leading site that covers topics related to business analytics, big data, data science, and data mining. Gregory has over 60 publications, with over 10,000 citations, including two best-selling books and several edited collections on data mining and knowledge discovery.
In his interview with Analytics Vidhya, he said that Artificial Intelligence will create smart machines that will destroy a huge swath of jobs currently done by humans.
7) Vincent Granvelli
Vincent Granvelli
Is the founder of the data science community, Data Science Central. Vincent also invented many synthetic metrics that work better than old-fashioned stats, especially on complex, sparse big data. Some of these techniques have been implemented in a MapReduce-Hadoop-like environment.
He is also the author of the book “Developing Data Analytic Talent”. In 2012, he was named as one of the Top 20 big data Influencers by Forbes.
8) DJ Patil
DJ Patil
DJ Patil was recently named as the White House’s deputy chief technology officer for data policy and chief data scientist, making him the first-ever national data scientist. DJ even coined the term “data scientist” back in 2008.
I personally like his interview and his talk, Data Science: Where are we going?, from the Strata conference. The most interesting part of his talk is when he speaks about the concept of open data. Here is an interesting quote from this talk: “Data, when it’s open, it provides transparency”.
9) Carla Gentry
Carla Gentry
Carla is a data scientist with over 20 years of experience. Over the course of her career, she has worked with many Fortune 100 and 500 companies, acting as data expert and liaison between the IT and business department.
In 2015, she was named as one of the most influential women in cloud computing. Here is how she defines the term “data scientist”:
Good data scientists will not just address business problems; they will pick the right problems that have the most value to the organization. The data scientist role has been described as “part analyst, part artist.”
10) Peter Skomorch
Peter Skomorch
Creator of both LinkedIn Skills and LinkedIn Endorsements – “one of the fastest growing product features in LinkedIn’s history” — Peter joined LinkedIn after serving as Director of Analytics for Juice Analytics. He was also at AOL Search as Senior Research Engineer.
He is currently the co-founder and CEO of a stealth mode startup. His Twitter page is one of the stops you should make in getting to know about data science.