Currently employed as the Director of Machine Learning in the Special Projects Group at Apple Inc., Ian Goodfellow has majorly contributed to the Deep Learning space. He is the inventor of generative adversarial networks, an ML technique that is being used by Facebook. Earlier in his career, he worked with Google, playing a key role in Street Smart (Google Maps) and Google Brain (AI Research) teams. Besides that, he has also co-authored a comprehensive book, Deep Learning, alongside Yoshua Beng and Aaron Courville.
11. Jason BrownleeFollow @TeachTheMachine
With the aim of ‘making developers awesome at Machine Learning’, Jason Brownlee founded the Machine Learning Mastery—a community offering various collaterals to help developers enhance their skills of applied Machine Learning.
12. Jess HamrickFollow @jhamrick
Currently employed as a research scientist at DeepMind, Jess Hamrick is a cognitive science enthusiast. Her key research area lies in human cognition by combining ML models with cognitive science. She is also one of the key maintainers of Jupyter/nbgrader—an open-source tool used to creating and grading assignments in the Jupyter notebook.
13. Dr. Kirk BorneFollow @KirkDBorne
Dr. Kirk Borne, a data scientist and astrophysicist, is one of the leading influencers in the Big Data/Data Science/AI space. He is currently employed as the Principal Data Scientist and Executive Advisor at Booz Allen Hamilton. He has also been a professor of astrophysics and computational science at George Mason University for over twelve years. His work has majorly contributed to various projects including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
14. Martin FordFollow @MFordFuture
Martin Ford is a well-acclaimed futurist and a keynote speaker, elaborating on topics such as AI and robotics, and their possible impacts on the market, economy, and society. He is also an author of three books, including the New York Times bestseller, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. He is also the Consulting Artificial Intelligence Expert for the Rise of the Robots Index project for Societe Generale Corporate and Investment Banking.
15. Mike TamirFollow @MikeTamir
Mike Tamir is currently the Chief Machine Learning Scientist and head of ML/AI at Susquehanna International Group, LLP (SIG). He is also a Data Science faculty member at UC Berkeley. Prior to this, he served as the Head of Data Science at Uber Advanced Technologies Group, and as the Chief Science Officer at Galvanize Inc. Earlier in his career, he was a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University.
16. Oriol VinyalsFollow @OriolVinyalsML
Oriol Vinyals is employed as a Principal Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, leading the Deep Learning team there. He has also led the AlphaStar team that developed the first AI that defeats the top professional players of the game, StarCraft. In the past, he was a Senior Research Scientist in the Google Brain team.
17. Peter SkomorochFollow @peteskomoroch
Presently serving as a senior executive and investor for numerous ML-driven startups and venture capital funds, Peter Skomoroch has over twenty years of experience in the Data Science industry. Over the years, he has worked as a Senior Research Engineer at the AOL Search Analytics team, Director of Analytics at Juice Analytics, Principal Data Scientist at LinkedIn, CEO and Co-founder of SkipFlag, and Head of AI Automation & Data Products at Workday, among various other roles. At LinkedIn, he played a key role in ideating, creating, and deploying LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements.
18. Soumith ChintalaFollow @soumithchintala
Soumith Chintala has co-created and led PyTorch, an open-source Machine Learning library developed by the Facebook AI Research lab for Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing applications. Having worked in the past on projects such as Google Street View House Numbers, pedestrian detection, sentiment analysis, and at New York University, he is also an extensive researcher in the ML space.
19. Yann LeCunFollow @ylecun
Yann LeCun is the VP and Chief AI Scientist at Facebook, leading the scientific and technical AI research and development for the organization. In addition, he is a professor at New York University. Early on in his career, he headed the Image Processing Research Department at AT&T Labs Research. Being one of the Godfathers of AI, he has made a huge contribution in the field of Computer Vision and Optical Character Recognition. He is also one of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award laureates for his contribution to the AI domain.
20. Yoshua BengioYoshua Bengio is one of the pioneers in the ML space, owing to his work on artificial neural networks and Deep Learning. He has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal for over twenty-five years. He also heads the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun are considered as the Godfathers of AI and have been awarded the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for achieving major breakthroughs in deep neural networks.
