8 Rising Stars of Data Science

As data science and artificial intelligence advances at an exponential rate, it’s easy to focus on the results itself without thinking about the people that make it happen. It’s thanks to these data scientists that we’re able to see such rapid growth in the technology that we use daily to improve our overall quality of life. Not only that, but these individuals are pushing communities forward, acting as leaders and mentors, providing thought leadership and guidance to emerging data scientists and community leaders. While there are countless individuals that are making a difference, here are eight rising stars that are worth paying attention to.

Andrej Karpathy is off to a strong start in his career. In 2016 he received his Ph.D. from Stanford following internships at OpenAI and Google Deepmind. He’s at the forefront of the autonomous vehicle revolution as the Director of AI at Tesla and also a prolific blogger, covering topics like neural net enabled Software 2.0.

Professor Daphne Koller helped kick off the MOOC revolution as a co-founder of Coursera. During her nearly two decades as faculty at Stanford, she was cited over 65000 times across her dozens of published papers. Now she’s gearing up for the next revolution in AI-assisted drug discovery at her latest startup, insitro.

Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, among other titles. Today, she is a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a Fellow at New America.

Andreas Mueller is best known for his work as a core developer on scikit-learn, the Python library that brought machine learning to the masses. Mueller is a lecturer at the Data Science Institute at Columbia University and author of the O’Reilly book “Introduction to Machine Learning with Python.”

Peter Bull of DrivenData is at the forefront of crowdsourcing for good. Peter talks frequently on how learning can be applied to challenges in the social sector and marshals a global community of data for good scientists via online competitions.

Mike Tamir is the Head of Data Science at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, as well as a lecturer for UC Berkeley iSchool Data Science masters program. He is currently working on FakerFact, an online AI tool meant to help you separate genuine articles from fake news. As a passionate mentor to the data science community, he is actively helping advance the next generation of data scientists.

Cassie Kozyrkov is quite literally the Chief Decision Scientist at Google, acting as the force behind bringing the practice of Decision Intelligence to Google. In her time there, she has trained over 15,000 Google employees in machine learning, statistics, and data-driven decision-making.

Josh Wills is a renowned data architect and contributor to the open source community as the lead on the Apache Apache Crunch project. Prior to his current role as Director of Data Engineering at Slack, he was instrumental in building Cloudera ML and the analytics infrastructure used in Google+.

These are just eight rockstars in data science that are working to advance the field, representing education, social good, fundraising, and more. Their work isn’t influential in a vacuum, rather they help to create a ripple effect with the people that they’re working with and educating too.

Want more? Don’t miss your chance to connect and learn from these data science rising stars and over 231 other influential presenters at ODSC West 2018 from October 31st to November 3rd in San Francisco.