Top 100 Big Data Experts to Follow

Geo-data company Maptive has recently published a post titled "A Data-Backed Approach: The Top 100 Big Data Experts to Follow in 2016." The post consists of a top influencer list that is both exhaustive and informative. Each influencer listed comes with basic professional biographical information, a computed score (the higher the better), and some of their best articles, videos, and other resources. Somewhat oddly (especially given that the list originates from a data-centric organization and is about data influencers), the formula for computing the "score" is not revealed, which is a little troubling. However, as with all data samples, including lists like these, the more the better, and so with or without an explanation of the score we can still gain insight from this particular instance.

While I encourage you to look over the particulars of the list linked above for some further detail, we have compiled a summarized table of the top influencers for your convenience. For interest's sake, we have also added the number of Twitter followers each influencers has. While Maptive's entire list holds 100 names, as stated above, we have only included the top 50 in our compilation below.



Without further ado, here is the countdown:

Rank	Name	Twitter	Followers	Score
1	Nate Silver	NateSilver538	1328K	81
2	Simon Porter	simonlporter	66K	80.5
3	Vala Afshar	ValaAfshar	101K	78.5
4	Kirk Borne	kirkdborne	58K	74
5	Timothy Hughes	Timothy_Hughes	134K	73.6
6	Vincent Granville	analyticbridge	128K	73.5
7	Randy Olson	randal_olson	80K	73
8	Hans Rosling	HansRosling	296K	72.05
9	Ronald van Loon	Ronald_vanLoon	29K	71.5
10	Gregory Piatetsky	kdnuggets	48K	70.35
11	Hilary Mason	hmason	68K	70
12	Andrew Ng	andrewng	48K	69.5
13	Dez Blanchfield	dez_blanchfield	77K	68.7
14	Bob E. Hayes	bobehayes	5K	68.65
15	Evan Sinar	EvanSinar	29K	68.6
16	Mike Briercliffe	mikejulietbravo	54K	68.5
17	Hadley Wickham	hadleywickham	23K	68
18	R Ray Wang	rwang0	80K	67.6
19	Jeremy Waite	jeremywaite	93K	67.5
20	Bernard Marr	BernardMarr	86K	66.5
21	Yves Mulkers	YvesMulkers	21K	66.15
22	Diego Kuonen	DiegoKuonen	5K	65.9
23	Tristan Bishop	KnowledgeBishop	56K	65.8
24	Holger Mueller	holgermu	17K	65.7
25	Louis Columbus	LouisColumbus	21K	65.5
26	Matt Asay	mjasay	16K	65.45
27	John Burn-Murdoch	jburnmurdoch	7K	65.3
28	Emilio Ferrara	jabawack	31K	65.2
29	Carla Gentry	data_nerd	27K	65.1
30	John Furrier	furrier	20K	65
31	Theo Priestley	ITreduc	8K	64.96
32	Michael Wu	mich8elwu	11K	64.85
33	Peter Skomoroch	peteskomoroch	28K	64.65
34	Doug Laney	Doug_Laney	37K	64.55
35	Mathias Golombek	EXAGolo	28K	64.45
36	Ajit Jaokar	AjitJaokar	7K	64
37	DJ Patil	DJ44	18K	63.9
38	Cameron Marlow	cameronmarlow	4K	63.85
39	Edd Dumbill	edd	10K	63.7
40	Timo Elliott	timoelliott	18K	63.6
41	Alistair Croll	acroll	20K	63.5
42	Merv Adrian	merv	23K	63
43	Scott Brinker	chiefmartec	22K	62.9
44	Gil Press	GilPress	9K	62.85
45	Joe Burridge	JoeFindsTalent	51K	62.75
46	Ben Lorica	BigData	30K	62.65
47	Jen Underwood	idigdata	6K	62.45
48	Lisa-Christina Winter	lisachwinter	10K	62
49	Eric Debray	ericdebray	4K	61.9
50	Andy Cotgreave	acotgreave	6K	61.75

Related:

• The 123 Most Influential People in Data Science
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