Top Datapreneurs in data science

Data Science Training

• Andrew Ng (Coursera)

  Coursera, one of the largest open source courses platform available on internet today, was founded by Andrew Ng with Daphne Koller. He also serves as Chief Scientist of Baidu, a Chinese language search engine.

  Previously, Andrew served as an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and was the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, the main AI research organization at Stanford, with 15 professors and about 150 students/post docs. In Fall 2011, he was the instructor of ml-class, a Machine Learning class that was one of Stanford’s first massive online courses, and had an enrollment of over 100,000 students. He is a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the 2009 IJCAI Computers and Thought award, one of the highest honors in AI.

• Sebastian Thrun (Udacity)

  Sebastian founded Udacity with a motive of democratizing education. Sebastian dreams of providing world class education to everyone so that everyone has a fair chance to apply for any job and this world will be a better place to live. He wishes to empower all people in the world through quality education.

  In addtion, from the past 12 years, Sebastian is associated with Stanford University as a Research Professor. He was also fortunate to become a Google Fellow, as well as the inventor of the autonomous car and project lead on Google Glass. Sebastian has been named the 5th Most Creative Person in Business (Fast Company), among the 50 Smartest People in Tech (Fortune), and highlighted in 50 Best Inventions of 2010 (Time).

• Vik Paruchuri (Dataquest)

  Vik founded Dataquest in November 2014 with a motive of helping people learn real world data science skills. Dataquest allows you to gain hands on experience on R, Python, Linear Algebra and other essentials modules of data science interactively.

  Prior to Dataquest, Vik started multiple companies namely actigram labs, equirio. He has won various kaggle competitions in automated essay scoring and stock trading in the year 2012. His expertise lies in machine learning, web development and mobile development. He completed his graduation from University of Maryland. More than just knowledge, data quest allows you to work on real datasets problems which adds to your learning confidence.

• Gaurav Vohra and Sarita Digumarti (Jigsaw Academy)

  Jigsaw “aims to meet the growing demand for talent in the field of analytics by providing industry-relevant training and education to develop business-ready professionals.

  Gaurav is CEO of Jigsaw academy and has founded Jigsaw with Sarita Digumarti in the year 2010. He has over 10 years of experience in the field of analytics and has worked across multiple verticals including financial services, retail, FMCG, telecom, pharmaceuticals and leisure industries. Gaurav holds a MBA degree from IIM Bangalore. His expertise lies in Process Migration and offshoring; Business Planning; Operations; Loyalty Management; CRM; Marketing Analytics; Risk Management.

• Lovleen Bhatia (Edureka)

  Edureka aims to make learning easy, interesting, affordable and accessible to millions of learners across the Globe. With the use of technology, excellent instruction and flexible schedule it aims to become the largest and most engaging learning platform on earth.

  Lovleen Bhatia, an IIT-BHU alumni co-founded Edureka in mid-2011 with Kapil Tyagi, an IIT Bombay alumni. Lovleen Bhatia is instrumental in setting up the strategic direction of the company, defining company’s priorities, driving the mission and company’s work culture. He brings with him 13 years of expertise across domains like technology, digital marketing, growth hacking, customer acquisition and hiring. Prior to co-founding Edureka, he headed the R&D at DbyDX Labs.

Data Science Communities

• Anthony Goldbloom (Kaggle)

  Anthony Goldbloom founded Kaggle with Ben Hamner, a startup that helps companies outsource thorny problems to data crunchers like him. Back in 2008, He had a reporting internship at The Economist in London—a position he snagged by winning an essay contest. While working on a story about predictive modeling, he spoke to people at large companies who told him how hard it was for them to make sense of data they had collected. Many companies didn’t even have anyone who could do it. That gave Goldbloom the idea: he would create a website where data scientists could compete to win cash in their spare time by solving such problems for companies.

• Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro (Kdnuggets)

  Gregory is a role model for us at Analytics Vidhya. He started Kdnuggets back in 1997, when people had no idea what data science is. Just imagine – this was before Google started! The best way to understand Kdnuggets is to think of them as Craigslist of analytics – If you need any thing in data science / analytics, Kdnuggets is probably your best bet.

  Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Ph.D. is the Founder of KDnuggets, which provides consulting in the areas of business analytics, data mining, data science, and knowledge discovery. He has extensive experience developing CRM, customer attrition, cross-sell, segmentation and other models for some of the leading banks, insurance companies, and telcos. He also worked on data analysis of clinical trial, microarray, and proteomic data for several leading biotech and pharmaceutical companies. He is also the co-founder of ACM SIGKDD, the leading professional organization for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

• Vincent Granville (AnalyticsBridge, DataScienceCentral)

  Vincent co-founded AnalyticsBridge, DataScienceCentral in 2011 and claims to perform outstandingly well as its revenue grew from 5 to 7 digits in less than two years, while maintaining profit margins above 65%. DataScienceCentral is an entirely self-funded, lean startup with no debt, and no payroll.

  Vincent holds a PhD from Cambridge University and National Institute of Statistical Sciences. He has published 40 papers in statistical journals, speaks regularly at international conferences, and is among Forbes Top 20 Big Data Influencers. His area of expertise lies in analytics, big data and data science.

• Rohit Sivaprasad (Datatau)

  Rohit Sivaprasad started an online community similar to hacker news for the subject he’s interested in: data science. He doesn’t want DataTau to turn into a virtual land of obscure technical questions and answers like Stack Overflow. Instead, he’d like lots of people from all over the world to come to one site and talk with each other on a higher level.

  Sivaprasad himself is a data evangelist and has built up much of his data science knowledge on his own, through online courses. He has contributed to the scikit-learn machine learning toolkit for Python.

Related:

• 10 Predictive Analytics Influencers You Need to Know
• Top 30 people in Big Data and Analytics
• Top Big Data Influencers and Brands
• Top Big Data influencers of 2014, according to HadoopSphere