Women in Analytics, Data Science, Data Mining?

While most people in this field are men, there is a growing number of women in this field, loosely defined as union of Analytics, Business Intelligence, Data Science, Data Mining, Machine Learning, and Text Analytics. Here are some of the currently active ones. Please add more in the comments below!

(July 15, 2012, GPS: added split by geography, ordered alphabetically by last name, added European and Asian sections, added some of the women scientists from the comments to the body of this section)

North America

• Tanya Berger-Wolf, Assoc. Prof. at UIC, a leading researcher in machine learning, computational biology, and data mining.
• Meta Brown, @metabrown312, a top consultant in text analytics
• Fern Halper, a partner at Hurwitz & Associates, a consulting, market research, and analyst firm, a thought leader in business analytics, text analytics, and cloud computing.
• Corinna Cortes, a top researcher in machine learning, currently Head of Google Research, New York.
• Claudia Imhoff, @Claudia_Imhoff, CEO Intelligent Solutions, co-author 5 books, founder Boulder BI Brain Trust (BBBT).
• Piyanka Jain, @AnalyticsQueen, President and CEO, Aryng.com - Analytics training for Business Impact
• Hilary Mason, @hmason, Chief Scientist of bit.ly, a Dataist, Co-Founder of HackNY, and a frequent speaker on machine learning and data science.
• Manya Mayes, an expert in SAS and Text Analytics
• Claudia Perlich, Chief Scientist Media6Degrees, winner of multiple data mining competitions and best paper award at KDD-2011 conference.
• Yan Qu, Chief Scientist for @sharethis, expert in big data analytics and algorithms, social media, social network, graph mining, and more.
• Olivia Parr Rudd, an internationally recognized expert speaker and facilitator in Predictive Analytics and Innovative Leadership.
• Wei Wang, a professor at UNC Chapel Hill, leading researcher in data mining, bioinformatics and computational biology, and databases.

Europe

• Francoise Soulie-Fogelman, VP Innovation at KXEN, co-chair of ACM KDD-2009 conference
• Fosca Giannotti, CNRS and professor at Univ. Pisa, Italy, leader of several KDD projects and an important voice in privacy issues, PC co-chair of ICDM 2008
• Katharina Morik, professor at TU Dortmund, Germany, leading the collaborative research center on resource-aware data analysis, editorial boards of KAIS and DMKD, one of the founders of IEEE ICDM, co-chair of ICDM 2004, co-chair of ECML PKDD 2008
• Michele Sebag, professor at Univ. Paris-Sud, France, leading the LRI and the TAO group on machine learning, optimization and evolutionary algorithms, editorial board of the Machine Learning Journal, PC co-chair of ECML PKDD 2010

Asia

• Sunita Sarawagi, a leading researcher in databases and data mining, SIGKDD Executive Committee member, associate professor at IIT Bombay.

Pallika Kanani
This is great! We seriously need more women role models in this field...Check out the workshop for Women in Machine Learning at NIPS this year: wimlworkshop.org/

Guest
It makes me proud to see that the tech industry is beginning to recognize the contributions made by women. My background is in Business Intelligence, analytics and data management and I also have a women's empowerment blog that I would love to share this article on. bit.ly/uzPF6I

Rashid B
Una-May O'Reilly
Principal Research Scientist
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab people.csail.mit.edu/unamay/

Guest
There are some European women, as well:

Fosca Giannotti, CNRS and professor at Univ. Pisa, Italy, leader of several KDD projects and an important voice in privacy issues, PC co-chair of ICDM 2008

Michele Sebag, professor at Univ. Paris-Sud, France, leading the LRI and the TAO group on machine learning, optimization and evolutionary algorithms, editorial board of the Machine Learning Journal, PC co-chair of ECML PKDD 2010

Katharina Morik, professor at TU Dortmund, Germany, leading the collaborative research center on resource-aware data analysis, editorial boards of KAIS and DMKD, one of the founders of IEEE ICDM, co-chair of ICDM 2004, co-chair of ECML PKDD 2008

Jay Chen
I am surprised, too. This list is missing lots of truly important women in computer science. Gregory, can you report the absolute numbers of this poll? They must be in the tens or less so one can suspect that its mostly friends and family voting. Half of this list are consultants who probably used this to advertise their names...

Gregory, you should avoid polls that have "marketing" value for companies or individuals - the obviously skewed results discredit KDNuggets, too. Just take the tools pool from last month - who on earth truly believes believes that R or any of the big vendors (SAS, SPSS) should not be leading this list by a huge margin? This "important women in DM" is equally ridiculous. A few of those are well known, yes. But half of those just have enough buddies.

Gregory PS
Jay, this is not a poll but a list of notable Women Data Scientists (mainly US-based), which I made in response to a woman blogger who asked for some examples of Women in Analytics. Of course, this list is incomplete, but additions in comments are most welcome.