Top 10 World’s Best Data Scientists To Follow In 2020
A career in Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Neural Networks has been widely acclaimed to be the most promising field with fat paycheques. We at Analytics Jobs has researched extensively and has published the world’s top 10 data scientists to follow in 2020.
The ranking is based as per the following parameters :
- Total-experience
- Number of research papers published
- Awards and recognition's
- Contribution to data science and AI community
1. Dean Abbott: With more than 21 years of experience, this seasoned data science professional is the founder and president of Abbott Analytics, San Diego, California.
He is adept at deploying advanced and complex data mining techniques, data visualization and data preparation. He has got outstanding expertise in survey analysis, fraud detection mechanics, data and modeling, predictive toxicology, signal processes, and missile guidance. Mr. Abbott has been a principal consultant to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also a world-acclaimed trainer and instructor of many popular data mining courses. His lucid methodology of teaching has helped to shape careers of endless budding data scientists.
His work includes co-authoring :
1. IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook,
2. Applied Predictive Analytics: Principles and Techniques for the Professional Data Analyst.
Read more about him at http://www.abbottanalytics.com/data-mining-consulting-services-about.php
Follow his blog at http://abbottanalytics.blogspot.com.
2. Dhanurjay Patil: A former US Chief Data Scientist, Dhanurjay Patil is one of the most distinguished and acclaimed data scientists. He received his doctorate in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland College Park. He has been a principal consultant to many blue-chip companies like salesforce, Paypal Linkedin, Skype, eBay, and Greylock Partners.
It was Mr. Patil who along with Jeff Hammerbacher, coined the term “data science”.
Patil has worked with the US Defence Department in its Advanced Systems and Concepts Office. He led a team known as the Threat Anticipation Project. The project aim was to anticipate threats related to :
a. Weapons of mass destruction
b. Human rights violations in the failed states/countries
c. Terrorism.
His team deployed social network analysis to anticipate these threats.
Just to add, he is the son of the popular Venture Capitalist and the founder of Cirrus Logic. Mr. Suhas Patil. He is now working with Venrock as an adviser. Earlier he worked as a VP, Product at RelateIQ that was later on acquired by Salesforce. He has also worked a Chief Product Officer in Color Labs and as a chief data scientist at LinkedIn.
You can find more about him on Wikipedia at :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Patil
3. Jeff Hammerbacher: Jeff has led the data team of Facebook. He was brought in by Facebook in back 2006 when Facebook was accumulating tons of data faster than it’s the ability to store and analyze that data. He soon developed methods and techniques for capturing, storing and analyzing a large amount of data at Facebook. He threw his weight behind adopting Hadoop which enabled Facebook data team processing real-time tons of data and at a lightning-fast speed. This led the foundation of Facebook’s targeted Advertising methodology which is at present contributes more than 70% to the company’s revenue.
He has worked as a chief data scientist and co-founder at Cloudera. He has also been an instructor at the Icahn School of Medicine. He was the co-founder of the term, “Data Science” along with Dhanurjay Patil
Jeff has also been associated with the likes of MIT Technology Review, Ney York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Forbes.
You can find more about him at :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hammerbacher
4. Yann LeCun: He is a renowned French-American data scientist. He is known for his exemplary work in the fields of Computer vision, Natural Language Processing, Machine learning, Robotics, and computational neuroscience. A Ph.D. in computer science, Mr. LeCun is again well known for his work in :
a. Optical Character Recognition and Computer Vision using Convolutional Neural Networks.
b. Chief creators of DjVu image compression technology
c. Co-developed the Lush programming language with Leon Bottou
d. He is called the founding father of Convolutional nets.
Mr. LeCun is also a fantastic instructor and you can find his popular playlists of YouTube at :
• Talks by Yann LeCun
• Lectures Series by Yann LeCun
• Debates and Panels with Yann LeCun
• Interviews of Yann LeCun
• Demos by Yann LeCun
• Six short videos to explain AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Convolutional Nets
You can find more about him at :
http://yann.lecun.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann_LeCun
5. Kenneth Cukier: A US-based journalist and author by profession, Kenneth Cukier is best known for his book titles: “Big Data: a revolution that will transform how we work, live and think. This book was the best seller in New York and has been so far translated into 21 languages. At present, he is currently engaged as a Sr. Editor and the host of the weekly podcast of technology, Babbage.
Kenn is also one of the directors at Chatham House, a distinguished member of the Council of Foreign relations and also an Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School.
Kenn is also a regular acclaimed speaker at various forums which includes, with talks at Ted, Google, World Bank, Council of Foreign relations, Mckinsey, World Economic Forum, US State Department, IMF, GE, and various universities of reputes with the likes of MIT, Cambridge, and Harvard.
You can find more about him at :
http://www.cukier.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Cukier
https://mediadirectory.economist.com/people/kenneth-cukier/
6. John Myles White: He is a Julia developer and a data scientist at Facebook. He is a well-known speaker and writer and has authored several best selling titles :
a. Bandit Algorithms for Website Optimization
b. Machine Learning for Hackers, and
c. Machine Learning for Email
He has worked extensively and has expertise in machine learning, R Programming language, data science, and Statistics. He regularly posts his works and presentation on YouTube. You can find them at :
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=john+myles+white
7. Yoshua Bengio: A distinguished professor at the Department of the computer since and operations research at the Université de Montréal, Yoshua is a Canada based data scientist known for his work on deep learning, artificial intelligence, and neural networks. He has also received several awards for his work in deep learning space. He has been regarded as one of the three professionals most responsible for advancement in deep learning.
He had earlier co-founded Element AI, an artificial intelligence incubator. This company works in deploying data science & AI-based research into applications that can be actively adopted by businesses worldwide. He is at present serving as a scientific and technical advisor to Recursion Pharmaceuticals.
He is also serving as a board member to various blue-chip companies and the companies are eager to use the benefit of his data intelligence. He is a recipient of two awards :
a. Marie-Victorin Prize in 2017 and
b. Turing Awarded in 2018
You can find more about him at :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshua_Bengio
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/
8. Geoffrey Hinton: In the world of data science, people called him as the godfather of deep learning, Hinton is an English Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist known for his work on artificial intelligence and neural networks. He is a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and is widely known for his exemplary work on neural nets. His focus of the research was on how neural nets can be taught to learn without human help or teacher. His research has been recognized as mathematically armed and experimentally filled with artificial intelligence. His work on finding striking similarities between human brain damage effects with the effects of losses in a net is a rare one. This way he paved the way for human brain impairment. His work has been proved to the start of an autonomous and intelligent machine that works very similar to the human brain.
Hinton has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. Being an impeccable work done in AI space he hag got the following awards :
a. IJCAI Award for Research Excellence lifetime-achievement award
b. Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering
Hinton has actively campaigned against the usage of artificial intelligence by military establishments. On one occasion, Hinton declined to make predictions for more than 5 years in the future as he viewed it as lethal to the human race and evolution.
You can find more about Hinton at :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/
9. Jurgen Schmidhuber: Jurgen is again popular for his impeccable work in artificial intelligence, deep learning, and artificial neural networks. He is sometimes called the father of modern deep learning.
He has been a pioneer in building up a self-improving AI system. He was a professor of artificial intelligence at the Università Della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland. He along with his students published a type of highly sophisticated recurrent neural network known as Long short term memory (LSTM). Today, LSTM is used in almost all the current applications.
He has been a recipient of some of the prominent awards :
a. Helmholtz Award of the International Neural Network Society in 2013
b. The Neural Networks Pioneer Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society in 2016.
You can find more about him at :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jürgen_Schmidhuber
http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/
10. Alex “Sandy” Pentland: He has been termed as one among the world’s seven most powerful data scientists along with Larry Page, then CEO of Google, by Tim O’Reilly in 2011.
Alex started his career as a lecturer at Stanford University in Computer Science and Psychology. Later on, joined MIT School of Engineering and MIT Sloan School as a faculty. He has also served as a board member with the American Bar Association, AT&T, UN Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and many start-ups.
He has also co-founded Media Lab Asia laboratories at IIT. He also founded and at present leading an MIT-wide program that works actively in pioneering computational social science using AI and Big Data. The aim is to better understand the human social structure and build trust. He is also engaged as an Academic Director at Data-Pop Alliance, a joint project on big data and human development co-created with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the UK’s Overseas Development Institute.
He also leads the Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program which promotes the companies who are using cutting edge technologies to solve real-world problems. He is also an advisor to the Enigma Project & Endor.
You can find more about him at :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Pentland
