Top 10 Data Scientists you need to know right now

Charles has quite an impressive ten years of experience under his belt, having worked at the CIA, Booz Allen Hamilton and now as the lead data scientist in the CSO at Deutsche Bank. All about sharing his wealth of knowledge to other c-suite execs learning about data, Charles is always working to either secure and use data properly or inform others about it.

He has taught Data Science courses at numerous international conferences including BlackHat and the Open Data Science Conference, as well as for O’Reilly media and Metis. Charles is very supportive of open source projects and is a committer for the Apache Drill project. You can find his podcast with EM360, discussing the importance of data for CISOs, right here, right here.

Abbott is the chief data scientist at SmarterHQ, his specialties lie in fraud detection, customer relationship management and understanding and explaining algorithms. Dean is simultaneously the founder and president of his firm, Abbott Analytics, which has been nearly going for 20 years. While Dean does most of his data science practices at SmarterHQ, he continues the teaching and public speaking aspects of his job at Abbott Analytics.

As if this weren’t enough, Dean is also the author of ‘Applied Predictive Analytics: Principles and Techniques for the Professional Data Analyst’, as well as the co-author of ‘IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook’.

The head of Google Research at NY, Corinna graduated with an MS degree in Physics back in Denmark, joining AT&T as a researcher and eventually receiving a PhD at the university of Rochester in computer science. Her research consisted of AI, machine learning, general science, algorithms and theory.

Cortes is a recipient of the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for her work on theoretical foundations of support vector machines. This award specifically recognised the development of a highly effective algorithm for supervised learning known as support vector machines (SVM). SVM is now one of the most frequently used algorithms in machine learning, which is used in practical applications, such as medical diagnosis and weather forecasting.

Andrew was chief scientist at Baidu Research, as well as an associate professor at Stanford University, and the founder and chairman of the board at Coursera. Since fluctuating between chief scientist, professor and founder was getting too much, Andrew decided to found the Google Brain project as well, which consists of making large-scale artificial neural networks that can recognise and record many different things (like cats in videos).

His work in machine learning and other areas has led to over 100 published papers, the links to which you can find on his website. A lot of his content propels the general understanding behind deep learning and how data can be assimilated into automated processes, furthering the case for why companies will need to make data their central focus and why Andrew will be relevant for decades to come.

Hilary Mason is the founder of Fast Forward Labs, a company with a wide range of professionals from the academic, startup and enterprise world. On top of this, Mason has also works as chief scientist for Bitly, Inc., as well as being the co-founder for HackNY.

Having made to Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list, Mason is recognised as a popular influencer on LinkedIn and has released videos of her presentations on YouTube.

Additionally, she is a member of NYCResistor, an interactive show that constantly offers new looks into our innovative and ever changing tech world.

Kira is the founder and CTO of SalesPredict, a platform that allows her to continue pioneering artificial intelligence based predictive analytics applications that transform how companies do business.

An award-winning thinker, Kira places in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list, recognised as a champion in enterprise technology. She continues her stream of benevolent thoughts in a blog, in which she writes about her application of predictive analytics and its benefits in the wider world of business and big data.

Whenever the blog starts getting a bit lonely she accompanies it with more content and insights on data, AI and analytic applications, contributing to the Harvard Business Review and giving talks which can be found on YouTube.

The former CEO and co-founder at Udacity, and a research professor at Stanford University, Thrun is behind the founding of Google[x], leading the Google driverless car project and continuing as an advisor.

Like many of the acclaimed people on this list, Sebastian is a popular influencer on LinkedIn and has received numerous awards and prizes for his work, being behind and contributing to 11 books and hundreds of papers.

Thrun is known for his work in probabilistic algorithms for robotics with applications including robotic mapping. At the age of 39 he was elected into the National Academy of Engineering and into the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, while also making it as one of Popular Science’s “Brilliant Ten scientists of 2005”.

The founder and chief data scientist at Data-Mania (possibly the company with the best name in this article so far), Lillian is a speaker, trainer, mentor and consultant when it comes to data science, analytics and big data.

Pierson contributed to the world famous ‘X for Dummies’ series by writing her own book under that label for data science. Once one feels like they are no longer a dummy on data science, they are also more than welcome to check out her blog, YouTube channel and professional work, where she breaks down several concepts in data science.

9. Jeff Hammerbacher Jeff is the co-founder of Cloudera, as well as having been on the faculty of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Before Cloudera, however, Jeff was busy working away as the leader of Facebook’s data team, as well as working as a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. It’s safe to say Jeff has basically done it all.

His work has earned him features in Forbes, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, Harvard Business Review, NY Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and many more, telling Bloomberg that, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

Jeff is now a member of the Board of Directors at Cytel.

Carla is the Data Scientist and founder of Analytical Solution, holding a Maths and Economics degree from the University of Tennessee. Her experience of 20 years includes working for Fortune 500 companies like Johnson & Johnson, Firestone and Kellogg’s.

Recognised as one of the most popular people in Big Data right now, she was named as one of the “10 IT Leaders to Follow on Twitter” by Information Week in 2013, and has since been in many, many top 10s over the years.

This is a picture of Carla wearing a really cool hat.