20 AI Influencers You NEED To Be Following

Allie Miller

Allie Miller is the Global Head of Machine Learning Business Development for Start-ups and Venture Capital at Amazon (AWS), advancing the greatest AI companies in the world.

She was named as AI conic’s 2019 “AI Innovator of the Year”, LinkedIn Top Voice for Technology and AI 2019 and 2020, Award Magazine’s Top 50 Women in Tech and Top 100 Global Thought Leaders, ReadWrite’s Top 20 AI Speakers in the World, MKAI’s Top 20 AI Mavericks, Data Salon’s Top 25 Data Science influencers in the world, and Neptune’s Top 20 AI Influencers.

Allie is also the Founder of The AI Pipeline to build stronger diversity in ML, co-founder of Girls of the Future, a national ambassador for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), an ambassador for the 10,000-person organization Advancing Women in Product, an angel investor in machine learning start-ups, and has won the Grand Prize in three national innovation competitions.

You can follow Allie on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alliekmiller/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/alliekmiller

Website: https://www.alliekmiller.com/

Dr. Satya Mallick

Dr. Satya Mallick was recently named one of top 30 AI people to follow on Twitter for 2017 by IBM’s AI blog. He is the founder of Big Vision LLC, a San Diego, California based company that specializes in computer vision, machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence consulting services and products.

Dr. Mallick is an accomplished computer vision and machine learning scientist and engineer. His works mainly focuses on face processing, object recognition using deep learning, computational photography, augmented reality, 3D reconstruction, medical image processing and many more. He has published several research papers in top notch conferences and journals.

At Big Vision LLC, Dr. Mallick and his team work with companies to solve computer vision and machine learning problems that have huge real-world impact in terms of speed and accuracy of algorithms, reduction in manual work, and identification and creation of intellectual property.

You can follow Satya on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satyamallick/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LearnOpenCV

Website: https://learnopencv.com/about/

Ronald van Loon

Ronald van Loon is currently the Principal Analyst, CEO of the Intelligent World. His continuous pursuit to advance education and thought leadership in big data, IoT, AI, machine learning, 5G, deep learning, predictive analytics, cloud, edge and data science made him recognized as a Top 10 Global Influencer and Thought Leader recognition by renowned institutions, and a combined social media presence that reaches over 340,000 active data and analytics fans across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and LinkedIn.

Ronald advises several companies and often shares videos on how to use AI and data science in organizations his YouTube channel. His YouTube channel focuses mainly on artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning, and latest technologies.

You can follow Ronald on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronald-van-loon-5411a/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ronald_vanloon

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIvbT_2gRdj8_Y0ZadGk-mg

Mariya Yao

Mariya Yao is the Chief Technology & Product Officer at Metamaven. As an AI designer, she designs and build lovable products enabled by modern big data, AI and machine learning.

She is also Editor-In-Chief of TOPBOTS, the largest publication and community for enterprise AI executives. She also co-authored the book “Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders” and write for Forbes about the interplay of AI and human.

Through Metamaven and TOPBOTS, she works with executives from a broad range of companies like Google, IBM Watson, Baidu, PayPal, Loreal, WPP, LinkedIn, Oracle, LVWH etc. and roles on business strategy, product design and technical implementation of ML initiatives.

Mariya is also passionate about democratizing AI education and speak at international conferences like SxSW, CES etc and in private corporate events.

You can follow Mariya on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariyayao/

Website: https://mariyayao.com/

Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng is VP & Chief Scientist of Baidu; Co-Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera; and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. 

In 2011, he led the development of Stanford University’s main MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform and also taught an online Machine Learning class to over 100,000 students, leading to the founding of Coursera.

Andrew’s goal is to give everyone in the world access to a great education, for free. Today, Coursera partners with some of the top universities in the world to offer high quality online courses, and is the largest MOOC platform in the world.

Ng also works on machine learning with an emphasis on deep learning. He founded and led the “Google Brain” project which developed massive-scale deep learning algorithms. This resulted in the famous “Google cat” result, in which a massive neural network with 1 billion parameters learned from unlabelled YouTube videos to detect cats. More recently, he continues to work on deep learning and its applications to computer vision and speech, including such applications as autonomous driving.

You can follow Andrew on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewyng/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndrewYNg

Website: https://www.andrewng.org/

Dr. Kirk Borne

Dr. Kirk is currently the Chief Science Officer at DataPrime, Inc. He is also a worldwide top influencer since 2013, Data Scientist, Global Speaker, Consultant, Astrophysicist. Space Scientist, Big Data & Data Science advisor, TEDx speaker, researcher, blogger, Data Literacy advocate. For more than 12 years, Kirk has also been an astrophysics and computational science professor at George Mason University.

He has also contributed to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Kirk’s specialisations include Data Mining, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, X-Informatics (Discovery Informatics, Science Informatics, and more), Computational-X (Computational Science, and more), Astro informatics (Data Science for Astronomy), Observational Astronomy (ground-based and space-based), Computational Astrophysics. He has a family of over 62,000 followers on LinkedIn.

You can follow Kirk on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirkdborne/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KirkDBorne

Website: http://kirkborne.net/

Fei-Fei Li

Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. She served as the Director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. And during her sabbatical from Stanford from January 2017 to September 2018, she was Vice President at Google and served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. 

Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s current research interests include cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and AI+healthcare especially ambient intelligent systems for healthcare delivery. In the past she has also worked on cognitive and computational neuroscience. Dr. Li has published more than 200 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences.

In addition to her technical contributions, she is a national leading voice for advocating diversity in STEM and AI. She is co-founder and chairperson of the national non-profit AI4ALL aimed at increasing inclusion and diversity in AI education.

You can follow Dr. Li on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fei-fei-li-4541247/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/drfeifei

Website: https://profiles.stanford.edu/fei-fei-li

Adam Coates

Adam Coates, a director at Apple received his PhD from Stanford University in 2012. Until 2017, Adam was the director of the Silicon Valley AI Lab at Baidu Research.

During his graduate career, he co-developed an autonomous aerobatic helicopter, worked on perception systems for early large-scale deep learning methods and household robots.

Mr. Coates developed deep learning software for high-performance computing systems with a team at Stanford, used for object detection, self-driving cars and unsupervised learning.

His projects are mainly based on Deep Voice, DL on COTS HPC, Stanford AI Robot, Deep Speech, Stanford Autonomous Helicopter and many more.

You can follow Adam on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apcoates/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/adampaulcoates

Website: http://www.apcoates.com/

Jennifer Chayes

Jennifer Tour Chayes is Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society, and Dean of the School of Information, at University of California, Berkeley. She is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Information, Statistics, and Mathematics.

Jennifer is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fields Institute, Association for Computing Machinery, American Mathematical Society, and Association of Women in Mathematics. She is the author of about 150 academic papers and inventor of over 30 patents. Her research areas include phase transitions in computing, structural and dynamical properties of networks, graph theory, graph algorithms, and computational biology.

Chayes’ recent work focuses on machine learning, with applications in biomedicine, climate change, and algorithmic fairness. Not only that, she was at Microsoft for almost 23 years, where she was most recently Technical Fellow (CVP), Co-Founder and Managing Director of three interdisciplinary labs: Microsoft Research New England, NYC, and Montreal.

You can follow Jennifer on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-chayes-6328145/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jenniferchayes

Yann LeCun

Yann André LeCun  is the Vice President, Chief AI Scientist at Facebook. Not only that, he also is a French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.

Yann co-developed the Lush programming language with Léon Bottou. He is well known for his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks (CNN), and is a founding father of convolutional nets. He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology

LeCun received the 2018 Turing Award (often referred to as “Nobel Prize of Computing”), together with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, for their work on deep learning. The three are sometimes referred to as the “Godfathers of AI” and “Godfathers of Deep Learning”.

LeCun is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award and the 2015 PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award.

You can follow Yann on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yann-lecun-0b999/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ylecun?lang=en

Website: http://yann.lecun.com/

Kate Crawford 

Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of the social and political implications of AI. With over 20 years of experience, her work has focused on understanding large scale data systems, AI and machine learning in the wider contexts of history, politics and the environment. Her latest book is Atlas of AI (Yale 2021).

She is a Research Professor of Communication and the STS at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR-NYC, and the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.

In 2021, she will be the Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and has been appointed an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney.

Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler, which maps the full lifecycle of the Amazon Echo, won the Beazley Design of the Year Award in the year of 2019 and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the V & A Museum in London.

You can follow Kate on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-crawford-a66574/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/katecrawford

Website: https://www.katecrawford.net/

Rachel Thomas

Rachel Thomas is currently the founding director of the USF Centre for Applied Data Ethics, whose objective is to address harms such as surveillance, disinformation, algorithmic bias, and other misuses of data. 

Rachel was selected by Forbes as one of 20 Incredible Women in AI, and is a former software engineer.  Not only that, she is also a co-founder of fast.ai, which created the “Practical Deep Learning for Coders” course that over 200,000 students have taken, and which focuses on students from diverse backgrounds, with small datasets, and with little computational power. Rachel earned her math PhD at Duke University.

She is a popular writer and keynote speaker, on topics of data ethics, AI accessibility, and bias in machine learning. Her writing has been read by nearly a million people; has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Korean, & Portuguese; and has made the front page of Hacker News 9x.

You can follow Rachel on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-thomas-942a7923/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/math_rachel

Website: http://www.fast.ai/about/#rachel

Spiros Margaris

Spiros Margaris, the founder of Margaris Ventures. He is also a Venture capitalist, futurist, keynote speaker and senior advisor (some mandates: stc Pay, wefox Group, SparkLabs Global, mediastalker, and F10 Accelerator).

Spiros is the first international influencer to achieve ‘The Triple Crown’ ranking (Global No. 1 FinTech, Blockchain, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) influencer by Onalytica). He regularly appears in the top three positions of established global industry influencer rankings. He is a keynote speaker at international FinTech, and InsurTech conferences.

He also gave a TEDx Academy Talk. He published an AI white paper, “Machine learning in financial services: Changing the rules of the game,” for the enterprise software vendor SAP. First non-IBM Keynote Speaker at the biggest IBM event in Europe (10/2019) “2019 IBM Systems Technical University”.

You can follow Spiros on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spirosmargaris/

 Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpirosMargaris

Jürgen Schmidhuber

Jürgen Schmidhuber isthe Director & Professor at The Swiss AI Lab IDSIA – USI & SUPSI and also the Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, NNAISENSE. His lab’s Deep Learning Neural Networks based on ideas published in the “Annus Mirabilis” 1990-1991 have revolutionised machine learning and AI.

By the mid-2010s, they were on 3 billion devices, and used billions of times per day through users of the world’s most valuable public companies, e.g., for greatly improved (CTC-LSTM-based) speech recognition on all Android phones, greatly improved machine translation through Google Translate and Facebook (over 4 billion LSTM-based translations per day), Apple’s Siri and Quicktype on all iPhones, the answers of Amazon’s Alexa, and numerous other applications.

 In 2011, his team was the first to win official computer vision contests through deep neural nets, with superhuman performance. In 2012, they had the first deep NN to win a medical imaging contest (on cancer detection). All of this attracted enormous interest from industry. His research group also established the fields of mathematically rigorous universal AI and recursive self-improvement in metalearning machines that learn to learn (since 1987).

Jürgen is recipient of numerous awards, author of over 350 peer-reviewed papers, and Chief Scientist of the company NNAISENSE, which aims at building the first practical general-purpose AI. He is a frequent keynote speaker, and advising various governments on AI strategies. 

You can follow Jürgen on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/j%C3%BCrgen-schmidhuber-39226872/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nnaisense

Website: https://t.co/r1kcTtC46F?amp=1

Paul Roetzer

Paul Roetzer is the Founder and CEO of PR 20/20 and Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute. Not only that, he is also an author of The Marketing Performance Blueprint (Wiley, 2014) and The Marketing Agency Blueprint (Wiley, 2012); and creator of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON) and the AI Academy for Marketers.

As a speaker, Mr. Paul is focused on making artificial intelligence approachable and actionable, and helping change agents drive transformation through marketing talent, technology and strategy. A graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, Roetzer has consulted for hundreds of organizations, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.

You can follow Paul on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulroetzer/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paulroetzer

Website: https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/

Martin Ford

Martin Ford is a futurist and the author of the New York Times bestselling “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future” (winner of the 2015 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award and translated into more than 20 languages) and “The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future,” as well as the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm.

With over 25 years of experience, he has written about the implications for future technology for publications including Forbes, The New York Times, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The Guardian

Martin has also appeared on numerous radio and television shows, including NPR and CNBC, CNN, Fox Business and PBS. Martin is a frequent keynote speaker on the subject of accelerating progress in robotics and artificial intelligence and what these advances mean for the economy, job market and society of the future.

You can follow Martin on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mfordfuture/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MFordFuture

Website: http://mfordfuture.com/

Dr. Ganapathi Pulipaka

Dr. Ganapathi Pulipaka is the Chief AI HPC Scientist and SAP Technical Lead at Accenture. He has over 23 years of SAP experience in project management of application development and technology integration of business systems design and architecture.

Fantastic Experience in Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Data Science, PyTorch, Python, TensorFlow, and R. Extensive experience in business systems design/Management consulting and Project planning and management in successfully delivering projects by collaboratively delivering program results by partnering with client for SAP and Artificial Intelligence with 33 projects.

As a consulting manager, delivered projects in multiple industry verticals with NetWeaver technology components such as SAP IBP HANA 1811, SAP CPI-DS, SAP PO, PI, SAP HANA Cloud Platform Integration – Data Services, SAP HANA Enterprise Architecture etc. His specialisations include SAP Management Consulting, Machine Learning and Data Engineering.

You can follow Ganapathi on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-ganapathi-pulipaka-56417a2/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/gp_pulipaka

Website: http://gppulipaka.org/

Adelyn Zhou

Adelyn Zhou is a business leader and bestselling author who is passionate about the intersection of marketing, automation, and the future of work. She has worked with some of the world’s top companies and fastest-growing start-ups on growth, blockchain applications, and applied artificial intelligence. She is recognized as a top influencer by Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., Wired, HubSpot and many others.

She started her career at the Boston Consulting Group and later led growth efforts at Amazon, Nextdoor, and Eventbrite. She is an internationally recognized speaker at conferences such as SXSW, CES, Inbound, and DLD.

You can follow Adelyn on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adelynzhou/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/adelynzhou

Siddha Ganju

Siddha Ganju is a Self-Driving Architect at Nvidia, who featured in 30 under 30 list of Forbes. Previously at Deep Vision, she developed deep learning models for resource constraint edge devices.

A graduate from Carnegie Mellon University, her prior work ranges from Visual Question Answering to Generative Adversarial Networks to gathering insights from CERN’s petabyte-scale data and has been published at top-tier conferences including CVPR and NeurIPS.

Siddha authored O’Reilly’s 600-page book on Practical Deep Learning for Cloud, Mobile, and Edge. With its strong reception, the book is being translated into five languages all in less than a year of publication.

As an AI domain expert, she has also been guiding teams at NASA as well as featured as a jury member in several international tech competitions. She has been an invited speaker and keynote speaker at multiple conferences and was the Youth Women’s Representative for India, 2013 at IET. Siddha is also a member of the Open Leadership Cohort, Mozilla Science Lab.

You can follow Siddha on the following channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidgan/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SiddhaGanju

Website: http://sidgan.github.io/siddhaganju