Top 10 Facebook Groups for Big Data, Data Science, and Machine Learning

Social media now not only shares friendship connections or photos of “selfies” but also spreads from political media to science information. Social network members are tending to more eagerly learn about big data, data science and machine learning through groups. We review the ten largest Facebook groups in this area.

By Thuy T. Pham, U. of Technology Sydney on November 23, 2016 in Big Data, Data Science, Facebook, Machine Learning

comments

It used to be that Facebook was for personal communications and LinkedIn for business.

But simple world dominance is not enough for Facebook, and it is aiming to take larger share of business world with products like Workplace for Facebook. Facebook groups for Big Data and Data Science, while still much smaller than LinkedIn Groups in this area are growing and provide an important new forum for discussion.

This post introduces ten largest Facebook groups in big data, data science and machine learning. These groups have more than ten thousand of members and are listed in order of group size from large to small as of Nov 18, 2016. Group overview is based on information as it has appeared on Facebook.com.

1. machinelearningforum (Data Mining / Machine Learning / AI)

This is the largest group in the field up to date maintained by eight admins (created on August 18, 2007). The group, comprised of 29,638 members, shares interest in various aspects of data mining, machine learning, human computer interaction and artificial intelligence. The current event of this group is on 19-20 Nov 2016 at Oakland about Demystifying Deep Learning & Artificial Intelligence have 1700 guests interested so far.

2. data.analytics (Analytics, Data Mining, Predictive Modeling, Artificial Intelligence)

This is a public group of 26,427 members, monitored by Guru Talreja since 8 years ago. Roughly more than twenty posts each day by members. These posts include networking events for data science and life sciences and files shared for using R packages.

3. BigDataisonline (Big Data)

Though this group consists of 21,239 members and is maintained by two admins (Daniyal Bashir and Mustafa Ali Qizilbash), it is a closed group and limits discussion to only Big data.

4. thesqlgeeks (SQL Server Geeks)

There have been 17,980 members (created on November 18, 2012). The group is created by Amit R S Bansal (Director, SQL MCM, SQL MVP, MCT at SQLMaestros). It is introduced as a group of SSGAS, Asia’s largest SQL conference http://www.sqlservergeeks.com/. The last summit of 2016 in India attracted 900+ attendees and 70+ Speakers for 130+ sessions during 3 days.

5. hadoop.group (Apache Hadoop Ecosystem)

The group contains 17,080 members and was created on March 1, 2008. It is currently maintained by Siddharth Tiwari (Head of R&D at Dell EMC, joined about 5 years ago) and John F.X. Berns (Sr. VP, Head of Data Science at Lazada Group joined about 3 years ago). Though the group have been interested in a distributed computing platform written in Java, Hadoop, it also includes key tags of Big data · Machine Learning. Recently they have events in Big data such as Master Big Data and Hadoop Step-By-Step from Scratch (en Français) and Face Detection using MapReduce (April 2016).

6. bigdatalearnings (Big Data Learnings)

Being created in 2012 by Karan Gulati, a Software Developer Engineer (BI/Big Data) at Microsoft Redmond Campus, the group has 16,860 members. These days it is also managed by Sudhir Rawat (Lead Technical Consultant at Microsoft). The group discuss about Big Data and Microsoft's Hadoop distribution aka HDInsight. The group administrators host fortnightly sessions on Hadoop and Big Data and all of them are live in their YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/Debarchans.

7. bigdataanalysis (Bigdata Machine Learning)

This group has 14,549 members and was created in 2013 by Min-kyung Kim (Chief Executive Officer at BICube CO.,LTD). Recently the group has an online event over a web conference about “Art of doing Causality research with large data sets”.

8. sqlbangalore (SQLBangalore)

This is a group based in Bangalore, an IT Hub of India, and is supported by Bangalore .NET UG (BDotNet), Bangalore ITPro UG (BITPro), SQLPass and Microsoft. Discussion topics of the group are limited to SQL Server, NoSQL, Big Data, and BI. The current group size is 13,078 members. According to their event information, they often meet in events every few months with hundreds of guests.

9. analyticsedge (Data Science with R)

This is a closed group of 11,923 members. It is just recently created in 2015, maintained by four administrators. They have frequent events for conferences and seminars for R and data science. For example the user meeting European R October 2106 at Poland was an international conference that aims at integrating users of the R language. There was also a seminar at LinuxWorld Informatics Pvt Ltd about practical session with real industry level topics, e.g., platform for Big Data Hadoop using Linux Kernel or Redhat/Centos/Fedora or Ubuntu/Mint.

10. bigdatastatistics (Big Data, Data Science, Data Mining and Statistics)

This is a forum for Big Data, Data Science, Data Mining and Statistics, created by Henrik Nordmark (Head of Data Science at Profusion) on December 28, 2012. The forum is a diverse group of 10,814 people with many different backgrounds and skills. They have two threads for learning resources, one for online courses and one for books.

Related: