Due to the diversity of work, specialization, publications, experience and fan following of world’s leading data scientists it became very difficult for us to put across the names of leading Data Scientists to follow in 2016.

We finally decided to do a poll among ourselves (a group of bloggers at analyticscosm) and publish the initial list. Since this initiative is first of its kind at Analyticscosm, we’d keep updating the list based on the comments that we receive, and based on further research that we carry out.

I think the list we’ve come across is fairly representative of various industries and disciplines (from Sociometry ). So here’s our list of Leading Data Scientists and their Linkedin/Twitter profiles (not in any particular order):

Andrew Ng

Chief Scientist of Baidu; Chairman and Co-founder of Coursera; Assoc. Professor (Research) of Stanford University

Social Media: Linkedin; Twitter; Quora

DJ Patil

U.S. Chief Data Scientist at White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Co-coined the term “Data Scientist”

Social Media:Linkedin; Twitter;Quora

Jeff Hammerbacher

Founder and Chief Scientist of Cloudera, Assistant Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Director at Sage Bionetworks

Social Media:Linkedin; Twitter;Quora

Brian Wilt

Director, Head of Data Science and Analytics at Jawbone

Social Media:Linkedin; Twitter

Hilary Mason

Member of Board of Directors, Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology; Founder, Fast Forward Labs; Data Scientist in Residence, Accel Partners

Social Media:Linkedin; Twitter; Quora

John Akred

Founder & CTO @ Silicon Valley Data Science

Social Media:Linkedin; Twitter; Quora

Alex `Sandy’ Pentland

MIT (Media Lab, Sloan Business School, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society), Cogito Corp, Thasos Group

Co-Founder and Board of Directors, Cogito Corp

Social Media:Linkedin; Twitter

Sebastian Thrun

Founder and CEO at Udacity; Research Professor, Stanford University

Social Media:Linkedin; Twitter; Quora

Jure Leskovec

Chief Scientist at Pinterest; Assist. Professor at Stanford

Social Media:Linkedin; Twitter

Kevin Novak

Head of Data Science Platform at Uber

Social Media:Linkedin; Twitter

Riley Newman

Head of Data Science at Airbnb.com

Social Media:Linkedin; Twitter; Quora

Yair Livne

Director of Product Management at Quora, Yair previously completed a PhD in Economics at Stanford GSB, after working at an Israeli hedge fund. He has a B.Sc. and masters in math from the Hebrew University.

Linkedin; Twitter; Quora

Michelangelo D’Agostino

Data scientist at Civis Analytics, Reformed physicist turned data scientist. Science writer and teacher. Former member of the Obama 2012 data analytics machine

Linkedin; Twitter; Quora

Diane Wu

Co Founder, Trace Genomics; Previously deep learning data scientist @ MetaMind, Machine Learning @ Palantir Technologies. PhD @ Stanford (’12) majoring in Genetics and specializing in Computational Biology

Linkedin; Twitter; Quora

Sean Gourley

CTO and cofounder of Quid

Linkedin; Twitter; Quora

Some Other Leading Data Scientists

Jonathan Goldman: Linkedin; Twitter

George Roumeliotis: Linkedin

Jace Kohlmeier: Linkedin; Twitter

John Foreman: Linkedin; Twitter

Usama Fayyad: Linkedin; Twitter

Jack Y. Chen: Linkedin; Twitter

Amy Gershkoff: Linkedin; Twitter