Top 10 Data Science Influencers and Blogs to Follow in 2024

1. Vincent Granville

Vincent Granville is a visionary Data Scientist, Mathematician, Entrepreneur, founder of Data Science Central (now acquired by tech target) and datascienceshaping.com, the largest community for data scientists. He has over 20+ years of corporate experience with renowned ventures like eBay, NBC, CNET, Visa, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, etc.

With over 56,000+ followers on Linkedin, Granville enriches its followers by sharing and discussing machine learning processes, public keys, advice for data analytics leaders, data science techniques, statistical modeling, predictive modeling, fraud detection, business intelligence, etc.

He shares the latest resources, whitepapers, and articles for the new Data Scientists in making.

You can follow him on Linkedin and Twitter. And you can read his various articles about data transformation here.

2. Hadley Wickham

Hadley Wickham is a New Zealand-based statistician, who is currently employed as chief scientist at Rstudio (a firm making enterprise-ready professional software suites for data science teams). He is also an Adjunct Professor of Statistics at the University of Auckland, Rice University, and Stanford University.

Wickham is a true ingenious who has simplified approaches to data import, analysis, and modeling through his various contributions in the form of the development of software packages for the R language for data visualization, Tidyverse packages, ggplot2, and more.

For contribution to statistical practices with innovative research in statistical graphics & computing, the American statistical association made him their fellow. For his dedicated contribution towards statistical computing, visualization, data analysis, he has even become the recipient of the COPPS Presidents’ award in 2019.

He is the voice behind bestsellers named R for Data Science, Advanced R, Advanced R solutions, and more.

Wickham has over 122.2k followers on his Twitter, where he talks about his latest book, latest findings around R programming, Data Visualization, etc.
You can follow him on Twitter and Linkedin.

3. Kristen Kehrer

Kristen Kehrer is a statistician who is a Data Science academic as well as the founder of the Data Science blog “Data moves me”. And with more than 83,000 followers on Linkedin, Kehrer became “Top Voice in Data Science and Analytics” over Linkedin. Before founding her blog “data moves me”, she was a Data Science instructor at UC Berkeley Extension.

Kristen in her initial career in Data Science built 100’s of econometric ARIMA models & neural net models around the Utility industry for the purpose of electric & gas load forecasting. Her passion lies in bridging the communication gap between data scientists and management, by putting forth every effective advice, solution, and product.

She has been doing data modeling projects mostly around e-commerce while working for companies whose products support small and mid businesses (SMEs).

Kristen started posting blog articles about machine learning projects and further continued writing data science trends, about products, which helped her gain a lot of traction and effectively helps to skill up the Data Science professionals and decision-makers or other business stakeholders.

You can follow Kristen Kehrer on Twitter and Linkedin if you wish to learn what’s more there to learn in Data Science.

4. Usha Rengaraju

Usha is India’s leading Data Science leader who is currently employed as Data Scientist at Infinite Sum Modelling. She is also the founder of “neuro.ai”, which is the company established to give data-driven advanced neuroimaging capabilities to the various caregiving companies of biopharmaceutical, clinical research organizations, and more.

She has great intellect around disciplines like Economics, Business Analytics, Finance Business, Psychology. She has more than 7 years of experience as a Data Scientist and organized the TensorFlow User Group Mysore and GDG Mysore.

Rengaraju successfully organized the 1st ever symposium for Neuroscience and Data

and even articulated the Data Science Master’s program curriculum for BITS Pilani, which is consumed by over 20,000+ students.

This prodigy has been an integral part of various events like Google Cloud Next 18, DevForest, Indo Data Week, PyLadies, & so many others.

She even volunteers at WiMLDS (Women in Machine Learning And Data Science), a global non-profit organization that supports & empowers women & gender minorities who are practicing, studying, or are interested in exploring the fields of machine learning and data science by hosting technical workshops, networking events, hackathons, and introducing 31 Data Science certifications.

You can follow her on Linkedin and Twitter!

5, Nando de Freitas

Nando de Freitas is a machine learning professor at Oxford University, a lead research scientist at Google DeepMind, and a fellow of CIFAR (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research). 

He holds specialization in machine learning with deep learning, neural networks, and Bayesian optimization and inference. He had spin-off companies like Data Blue Labs (which is now acquired by Google).

He likes to conduct research in deep learning & associated areas including transfer learning, reinforcement learning, abstraction, multi-agents & applications to robotics & all types of data.

He has achieved many awards and accolades under his hood:

• Best paper awards at IJCAI 2013, ICLR 2016, ICML 2016
• Yelp Dataset award for a multi-instance transfer learning paper at KDD 2015
• 2012 Charles A. McDowell Award for Excellence in Research
• And the 2010 Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS) Young Researcher Award.

You can follow Nando de Freitas at LinkedIn and Twitter!

6. Fei Fei Li

Li is the co-director at Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute and is a pioneer in machine learning, AI, cognitive neuroscience. She is also a Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science.

In 2007 as an assistant professor, Li led a team of researchers around the project of ImageNet, where a visual database was deployed along with software to understand and recognize the visual objects. 

Within the next ten years, the ImageNet project proved to be a revolution for deep learning. Ms. Li is also a co-founder of AI4ALL, a non-profit that aims to expand the diversity and inclusion in artificial intelligence technology.

Ms. Li is a fellow of ACM (Association of computer machinery) and has been awarded International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) (2016), and National Geographic Further Award (2019).

You can follow Ms. Li on Twitter and LinkedIn!

7. Peter Norvig

Peter Norvig, the former chief scientist at NASA, is now a Director of Research at Google Inc. Norvig has a fondness for developing solutions for problems that can only be aided with Artificial intelligence.

He is a fellow of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), California Academy of Science, and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

He was also co-teacher of an Artificial Intelligence open online class that signed up 160,000 students. And has a deep interest in internet search, AI, NLP (natural language processing), programming education, machine learning, etc.

His most famous publications are:

• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field)
• Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp
• Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX

He has been a recipient of the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. 

He keeps adding interesting resources such as videos, posts, news to his Linkedin about machine learning, NLP, and data transformation. You can follow Peter Norvig on Twitter and LinkedIn!

8. Kirke Borne

Kirke Borne is a champion of Data Science, AI & astrophysics who works as an Executive Advisor at Booz Allen Hamilton.

Before this, for 12 years in a row, he was an astrophysics and computational science professor at George Mason University (GMU). He was also involved as an advisor to the undergraduate data science program and graduate computational science and informatics Ph.D. program.

He spent his 20 years giving support to NASA projects as a data archive project scientist at NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and also contributed to NASA's Space Science Data Operations Office, and NASA's Astronomy Data Center.

He is most passionate about data science, machine learning, the internet of things, modeling and simulation of complex systems.

He has quite a lot of experience in handling and managing large scientific databases & information systems, and also has expertise in scientific data mining.

He even contributed to the design & development of the new Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and did thoughtful research around informatics and statistical science, data management, education & public outreach, and galaxy research.

You can follow Kirk Borne on Twitter and Linkedin!

9. Tamara Mccleary

Tamara Mccleary is a CEO at Thulium, a global tech company that focuses on social media marketing strategy and brand amplification of businesses. Because of her influential work in enhancing the social media footprints of B2B and enterprise ventures, Ms. Mccleary has been featured quite a lot of times in Forbes.

Her company Thulium drives smart data-driven social media by utilizing the power of artificial intelligence, data analytics, and machine learning, which gives impactful results to her B2B corporate clients.

Her company’s smart solutions are often consulted by big giants like Amazon, SAP, Oracle, SAP, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Mercer, Verizon, Marsh & McLennan Companies, RSA Security, Cognizant, Brink, and many more.

As an unparalleled expert of new technologies, storytelling, branding, and social influence & brand amplification, and thought leadership, she is a leading female technology influencer. She was even named as #1 Influential Woman in MarTech by B2B Marketing. And she ranks on top of global thought leadership, ranked by Klear, including top 5 in digital transformation, robotics, IoT, AI.

To keep witnessing her great vision and mission behind Thuliam, you can follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter!

10 . Sean McElwee

Sean is an activist, data scientist, and executive director of Data for Progress. At Data for Progress, he oversees its operations, polling, development & strategy, communication, and other important tasks.

Through his vision, he has combined politics with Data Science, and currently, his firm helps senators, presidential candidates, congress members, and movement organizations improve their causes, policies all based on data collected from public opinion.

After being a policy analyst at Demo, he worked for a decade to build his own product, which is now cited by politics at massive levels. His firm “Data for progress” uses R and stat for data analysis.

McElwee’s articles were featured in The New York Times, Vox, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. He even featured in Politico 50 & City & State’s Manhattan Watch List.

If you want to know how he perfectly combines the power of data with politics, you can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.