Top 12 Data Science Leaders To Follow In 2024

Data science leaders are shaping the data science landscapes with their groundbreaking contributions and steering towards the bright future of AI.

Data Science Leaders: Data science experts are thriving in this data-driven world. The companies value the knowledge of data science leaders. Many data science leaders aspiring or professional data scientists can follow to learn new algorithms and techniques from them.

You can enroll for the data science with ML course at Physical Wallah. The courses are available at a discounted price and cover from basics to in-depth concepts. You also have access to relevant projects and practice exercises to measure your knowledge. Post clearing the exam with 70%, you also get a certificate that can add value to your resume.

In this post, we have listed the top 12 data science leaders globally. Read on to learn about them. They are not just leaders but are making major contributions to the world of data science and AI with their exceptional expertise and one of them is famous data scientists in India.

You can follow them to dive in-depth into the world of data science since they are developing some cutting-edge algorithms.

Also read: What is Data Science?

Powerful Data Science Leaders in the World

The following are the powerful data science leaders in the world:

Andrew Ng

Dr Andrew Ng is the most famous data scientist and an inspiration to many data scientists who want to achieve big in this area. He is one of the Data science leaders who has a bountiful knowledge of Machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Apart from this, he is the one who is the founder of deeplearning.ai and the CEO of landing. AI. He also gives lectures in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University.

To do extensive research in the area of data science, he founded the deep learning artificial intelligence research team along with Google. This is named Google Brain. He also worked as a Chief scientist at Baidu.

There are around 1300 students who were mentored by this great data scientist in this AI group. He also developed the best AI strategy for the company. He also led the course development team at Stanford University and founded Coursera.

On this website, they are offering Machine learning courses for students. Many thousands of students have benefitted from this site. Being an expert in ML, he also holds a degree from the reputed Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California.

Many research papers are co-authored by this great data scientist in the field of robotics, ML and different fields and have been featured as the most famous data science leaders.

Andrej Karpathy

He is a Slovak- Canadian who holds a PhD degree from the reputed Stanford University. He is one of the famous data science leaders who has built JARVIS in open AI. It has become quite popular. Not just this, he also worked in the capacity of the director of artificial intelligence and autopilot vision at Tesla.

Andrej is very much interested to do research and learn more about deep neural nets. He has completed double majors in Physics and computer science and later went to Columbia to continue his studies.

He worked with Michael van de Panne to learn about controllers. He also got an opportunity to work with Fei-Fei-Li while doing his PhD at Stanford Vision Lab. In this company, he got to work on key concepts of data science like convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural network architectures.

There is also research done on how these concepts are used in natural language processing and computer vision. He also designed an instructor for convolutional neural networks for visual recognition.

He also blogs by sharing his thoughts about new concepts in data science and developing various libraries related to deep learning. He is certainly the most intelligent and great data scientist that the world has. There are some really good data science leaders podcast available.

Amena Anadkumar

She is from Mysore and is working as a professor at Caltech and one among many famous data scientists in india. She is also working as a director of AI research in one of the famous companies, i.e. NVIDIA. With her passion for data science and sharing a lot of input with youngsters, she grabbed the attention of many and has over 159417 followers.

The research carried out by her is in the areas of machine learning, high-dimensional stats and non-convex optimization. She has a degree from IIT Madras and later completed her master’s from Cornell University.

She has worked with Amazon web services as a principal scientist and is a member of IEEE, ACM and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She has developed novel artificial intelligence that is used in prediction weather, scientific simulations and making drugs. She has got prestigious awards of which the key one is the ACM Gordon Bell special prize for her research conducted on HPC during COVID-19 time.

Also read: Top Data Science Courses In 2024

Fei-Fei-Li

She is another famous data scientist and a leader who is excelling in this field. She is currently the co-director at the Stanford Institute for the area of Human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) as well as the vision & learning lab. She also gives guest lectures at Stanford university for computer science students.

Before this, she served as a vice president at Google and worked as a Chief Scientist at Google Cloud. With rich experience in the field of data science, she worked on cognitively inspired AI, computer vision, and machine learning and used AI in the healthcare industry.

Around 200+ scientific articles were published by her and many journals in different fields. The revolutionary project that is headed by her is ImageNet. She is also bringing revolution in STEM and AI at a national level.

For her meritorious work, she has received many prestigious awards and is featured in ELLE Magazine for being one of the Tech women in 2017. She also received a Global Thinker Award by Foreign Policy in 2015 and Great Immigrants: The Pride of America in 2016.

Yann LeCun

With a lot of experience in technical consulting, research, and scientific research, he is currently the Chief scientist at Facebook. He has done many commendable works such as computer vision, machine learning and computational neuroscience. He founded convolutional nets and worked on computer vision projects and stood as one of the Data Science Leaders.

He is the creator of DjVu and won the Turing Award in 2018. He has major contributions to machine learning that are applied to recognize handwriting. It is also used to recognize bank checks. Companies like NCR have used this technology in their platforms.

Ian Goodfellow

He is the most influential data scientist and is based out of America. He has done extensive research on machine learning and worked as a director of the Machine learning department at Apple. He has a B.S. and M.S. degree in computer science and these degrees were earned from Stanford University.

He earned a PhD degree from Universite de Montreal. He has ample experience in deep learning and worked as a research scientist at Google Brain. He wrote a book on deep learning and invented generative adversarial networks.

Clement Delangue

There are around 127491 followers of this great data scientist on LinkedIn. He is the co-founder of Hugging Face, which is an open-source ML platform. Many researchers and Data Science Leaders are contributing to this platform and building AI models. He completed a computer science and programming methodology degree from Stanford University.

He has start-up experience where he worked on building ML for computer vision. This start-up was acquired by Google. He is also the CEO and co-founder of VideoNot.es. Jay Alammar.

With enough experience and a lot of research in machine learning, he became a leader in data science. His research is primarily on machine learning, artificial intelligence, NLP and software. He is the director of NLP at Cohere. He also collaborates with machine learning engineers and Data Science Leaders and tries to solve a lot of business problems using AI and NLP models.

He also gives valuable advice to developers to use language models to resolve language processing use cases. He also writes blogs on machine learning in his blog and publishes a lot of stuff about machine learning, NLP and AI.

Also read: 6 Most-In-Demand Predictive Data Science Models in 2023

Sam Altman

He is a known name in the world of AI. He brought a revolution by bringing Chat GPT. He is the co-founder and previous CEO of OpenAI. He dropped out of Stanford University and left a bachelor’s degree in between and still became one amongst the best Data Science Leaders. He is a known data science leader globally. He is a co-founder of Loopt, which is a location-based app.

The company has secured $30 million in venture capital. This company was acquired by Green Dot but faced a lot of struggles.

He joined Y Combinator in 2011 and rose to the president role in 2014. He has ventured into eye-scanning authentication and worldcoin cryptocurrency to prevent fraud.

Yoshua Bengio

He is a known name who has made a lot of contributions to the artificial intelligence world. He has done a lot of research on deep learning and got a prestigious award called 2018 A.M. Alongside, he also won the Turing award. He worked as a full-time professor at the Universite de Montreal and founded the Quebec AI Institute.

He is the most cited computer scientist who clinched the Killam prize and is involved in the societal impact of AI discussion.

Jeremy Howard

He is an Australian and one of the best Data Science Leaders, educator, and entrepreneur. He worked as a management consultant with McKinsey & Co. as well as AT Kearney. He worked there for over 8 years before starting his firm.

He contributed to many open-source projects and developed the PERL language. He played a critical role in the evolution of PERL.

He has started companies like FastMail, which was later acquired by Opera software and Optimal Decisions Group. He worked as the founding CEO of Enlitic and was the past president of Kaggle. He is a research scientist at the University of San Francisco.

Demis Hassabis

He is a British computer scientist who is also a researcher and an entrepreneur. He made many contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. He was back in 1976 and has shown his prowess in Chess and became the Grandmaster at the age of 13.

He completed a computer science degree from Cambridge and co-founded Elixir Studios. He is one of the famous Data Science Leaders later founded DeepMind which is an AI research lab. It was later acquired by Google. He has made key achievements in machine learning, especially in the world of deep reinforcement learning.

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Data Science Leaders Background at a Glance

In this table, you can learn about the top 12 data science leaders and the companies founded by them along with their educational details:

Data science leaders name, their qualification, and roles handled
S.no	Name	Educational qualification	Designation & company name
1.	Anndrew Ng	Degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and the University of California, Berkeley	Founder and CEO of DeepLearning.AI
2.	Andrej Karpathy	PhD on convolutional or recurrent neural networks	Director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla
3.	Amena Anadkumar	IIT Madras (BS) and Cornell University (MS, PhD)	Senior director of AI Research at NVIDIA
4.	Fei-Fei Li	B.A. degree in physics from Princeton and PhD degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech)	Co-director at Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Vision & Learning Lab
5.	Yann LeCun	Diploma in Electrical engineering and PhD in computer science from Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris	NYU Center of Data Science
6.	Ian GoodFellow	B.S. and M.S. in computer science from Stanford University	Director at Apple
7.	Clement Delangue	College at ESCP Business School in Paris and completed the “Introduction to Computer Science” and “Programming Methodology” courses at Stanford University	Co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face
8.	Jay Alammar	Earned a Stanford degree in executive education, influence, and negotiation strategies program	Cohere (Ex)
9.	Sam Altman	Dropped out of BS from Stanford university	CEO of OpenAI (Ex)
10.	Yoshua Bengio	Bachelor of Science degree (electrical engineering), MSc (computer science) and PhD (computer science) from McGill University	CEO of Quebec AI Institute
11.	Jeremy Howard	Studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne.	Fast.ai
12.	Demis Hassabis	Bachelor’s in Computer Science Tripos, with a double degree from the Computer Lab at Cambridge	Founder of DeepMind now Google Deepmind

Got Inspiration from the Top Data Science Leaders?

Learning about the top data science leaders who are contributing to the AI world must have inspired you by now. If you are aiming and aspiring to join this club, you have to start with the Decode data science with machine learning course at Physics Wallah online. In this course, you will dive in-depth about Python programming, libraries used in machine learning and algorithms used to build ML models. After the course, you can get placed in different roles such as data analyst, data scientist and ML engineer. With a lot of practice exercises and working on real-time projects, you get a hold of the real-work environment.

Also read: 30 Best Data Science Books to Read in 2024

FAQs

Who is the ex-founder and CEO of Open AI?

The co-founder and CEO of Open AI was Sam Altman.

Who are the two powerful women Data Science Leaders globally?

Amena Anadkumar and Fei-Fei Li. These two women have made a mark in the world of data science by contributing towards the growth of data science.

Who is the co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face?

Every data science and aspiring one is aware of Hugging Face, which is an open-source machine learning platform. The co-founder and CEO of this company is Clement Delangue.

Who is the director and engineering fellow at Cohere?

The Director and engineering fellow at Cohere is Jay Alammar. He is one of the Data Science Leaders who helped many developers so far to solve real-time language processing problems and published many articles on machine learning and NLP.

Who in the famous data science leaders list won the Turing Award?

The Turing is a prestigious award that is won by two people in the best data science leaders list, i.e. Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.