Top 30 Data Scientist to follow in 2019

Data Science   |   
Published February 18, 2019   |   

The field of data is ever growing and ever progressive. And the need for organized data is on the rise. But it is not available in that manner from the beginning itself. The raw data is much unstructured and mixed up. There are many things which have no importance in the actual work, yet they get mixed up with entire data and have to be filtered out. That is where the job of a data scientist comes into the play.
The primary job being, organizing and maintaining proper data using scientific methods, processes, algorithms, and systems. It also includes extracting knowledge and analyzing the data to give vital outputs which can prove useful in the future. The demand for the post of data scientists is on the rise owing to the large scale of raw data in the firms.
Some of the data scientists have made a remarkable contribution to the field, and have set the benchmark very high for the coming generations. But they have also left behind many followers, those to whom they have acted as a mentor. Most of them have made their knowledge public through blogs, videos, online communities, professional networks, etc. And the people entering into the field treat them as their role model and take inspiration from their work.
Some of the most famous data scientists whose work you can look up and follow in the coming months of 2019 are:
1. Dhanurjay Patil: Also known by the name of DJ Patil, Dhanurjay Patil is the son of venture analyst Suhas Patil. He was the former US Defence Chief Data Scientist and needs no introduction. He did his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland College Park. He has been associated with many prominent companies such as LinkedIn, Skype, PayPal, and the list goes on.
2. Yann LeCun: He is a French computer scientist and is well-known for his contribution as the Chief of Artificial Intelligence at Facebook. Along with Leon Bottou, he co-developed Lush programming language. He works mainly in the fields of machine learning, and mobile robotics.
3. Allen Bonde: He started his career as a researcher in Artificial Intelligence as well and got some of his works patented too. But later in the life he became more of a digital marketer and has started advising startup companies. As an engineer and data scientist, CMO Allen helped product teams in excelling their unique selling proposition.
4. Jeff Hammerbacher: He has already led the data team at Facebook before being the co-founder of Cloudera. And before this, he has also been a quantitative analyst on Wall Street and an entrepreneur at Accel Partners. His investment in bitcoin with his wife resulted in a good return, which he donated for a good cause at a cancer hospital.
5. Josh James: Co-founder and former CEO of the web analytics company Omniture, Josh is also the founder of CEO.com. It brings together all the CEO’s and keeps them up to date regarding the happenings at the executive level. It keeps them equipped with the latest business and marketing strategies.
6. Yoshua Bengio: He is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on deep learning and artificial neural networks. Bengio has been a faculty member at Université de Montréal and is also co-director of Learning in Machines & Brains project at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
7. Geoffrey Hinton: He is the holder of Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh, and has not only worked for Google but also led its AI team along with working with the University of Toronto. Some consider him as the “Godfather of Deep Learning.”
8. Jurgen Schmidhuber: His urge drives him, and he aims to build up a self-improving AI system. He has published some papers and had awards for them as well. Jurgen is the co-director of Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Research in many districts in southern Switzerland.
9. Peter Norvig: He is the director of Research at Google Inc., and is also the co-author of ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach’ which is the leading textbook in the field. He is also a teacher at a classroom teaching program which has enrolled up to 160,000 students for the online.
10. Alex “Sandy” Pentland: Alex was named as the “World’s Most Powerful Data Scientist” by Forbes. During his work period from the last 29 years, he has co-founded many companies like Ginger.io, Cogito Health, etc. He is also hired as an advisor by many multinational companies like Nissan, Motorola and many more.
11. Daphne Koller: She is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, and also the founders of Coursera, which is an online education platform. Later on in the career, she also became the President and left the job at Coursera to become a chief computing officer at Calico.
12. Adam Coates: Adam is the Director of Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Lab in Baidu. He spent 12 years studying artificial intelligence before accepting his current position. He worked on many projects including the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter and the Stanford AI Robot.
13. Sebastian Thrun: He is an innovator and entrepreneur apart from being a computer scientist. He holds the position of CEO at Kitty Hawk Corporation, Chairman and Co-founder of Udacity. He has also served as the Vice President of Google.
14. Monica Rogati: She is the former Vice President of Data of Jawbone, and has played an important as the senior data scientist at LinkedIn. She introduced the “people you may know” feature on LinkedIn.
15. Hilary Mason: She is the founder of Fast Forward Labs and Data Scientist at Accel Partners. She has also been the Chief Scientist at Bitly.
16. Dean Abbott: The president of Abbott Analytics, Inc. is an internationally known data mining expert and has worked in fraud detection.
17. Andrew Ng: Andrew co-founded and led Google Brain and was a former VP and Chief Scientist at Baidu.
18. Dr. Kira Radinsky: She gained international recognition for the work at Microsoft research, for developing a predictive algorithm which recognized the early signs of global impactful events including disease epidemics and political riots. She is the Chief Scientist and Director of Data Science at eBay.
19. Bernard Marr: Along with being a data analytic, Bernard is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and strategic performance consultant.
20. Kenneth Cukier: He is most renowned for his work at The Economist and the book Big Data: A Revolution that will transform how we work and even think.
21. Lillian Pierson: She is a leading expert in the field of big data, and now appoints professionals and students for multinational companies.
22. Michael I Jordan: One of the leading figures in machine learning and has been praised by the title of the most influential computer scientist in the year 2016.
23. Jeremy Achin: He is known for founding DataRobot and has also been the Chief Executive Officer.
24. Carla Gentry: She is the most popular personality in the data science field over social media.
25. Olivier Grisel: He is most popularly known for his contribution in the scikit-learn. He is specialized in the research of Machine learning in general and Deep Learning in particular.
26. Owen Zhang: He has completed his education from the University of Science and Technology of China and is currently working with Hedge fund and DataRobot.
27. Stanislav Semenov: He has played a number of roles in his entire life which included Senior Software Engineer, Technical Consultant, Data Scientist, and Quantitative Researcher.
28. Sergey Yurgenson: Data Scientist with physics and neurobiology background. He is the Director of Advanced Data Science Services.
29. Kirk Borne: He is an astrophysicist and also a data analyst who used his talents at Booz Allen since 2015.
30. Doug Cutting: He is a software designer, advocate, and creator of open source search technology. He is the founder of Lucene and co-founder of Nutch.
Despite many challenges and failures which almost each one of them has gone through, they never gave up on their dreams, goals, and objectives. The works and efforts put in by them paid off to them. Each of them has done something, which has helped our generations in technological aspects.
The job of data scientist is not easy, and becoming famous and renowned is itself a great opportunity. In the coming year, many new features and technological advancements are to be launched, and it shall be interesting to note how the mentioned personalities play an important role in it.
Artificial intelligence is yet another option where every update introduces something new and exciting. The primary motive of the data scientists is to create an AI of such knowledge that it can sense your query by analyzing the situation. Also if you’re planning to go for a future in this field of career, you can have the help of these data scientist. As their achievements and their success mantra is also discussed by them on their blogs as well as videos which are available over the internet.
The need for such brilliant humans is quite massive to put innovations into our lives and make it more comfortable than ever.