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Big data is such a huge subject that it's tough to separate marketing fluff from expert opinion. So, we decided to compile a list of the most influential voices in big data. Why this list?
Well, it's based on Twitter data culled according to content, follower/following ratios, frequency of tweets, blog popularity, the opinions of other big data experts and our own subjective judgment.
One note: Some influential voices are not included, either because they don't have active Twitter accounts, or they only tweet about big data sporadically. Here, our goal is to provide the best possible stream of big data news and insight. While no list will ever be 100 percent on-topic, our goal here is to eliminate those who tweet on a wider range of subjects and focus on those who tweet mostly about big data.
Did we miss somebody? Let us know.
A
Alistair Croll – Analyst, writer, startup accelerant. Blogs at solveforinteresting.com
Alex Popescu – Software architect, tech evangelist @rethinkdb, Founder InfoQ.com, NOSQL Dreamer
Amy Heineike – Director of mathematics at Quid
Anthony Goldbloom – Founder and CEO of Kaggle
B
Ben Lorica – Chief data scientist @oreillymedia. Expert in big data, analytics and cloud computing, not to mention the guy who was smart enough to grab @bigdata.
Bill Hewitt – President and CEO of Kalido
C
Carla Gentry CSPO – Data scientist, founder of Analytical-Solution
D
David Smith – Data scientist, blogger, and R evangelist at Revolution Analytics
David Feinleib – Contributor to Forbes and blogger at The Big Data Landscape.
Derrick Harris – Cloud and infrastructure writer at GigaOM
DJ Patil – Data Scientist in residence at Greylock
Doug Laney – Research VP with Gartner. He's the guy who came up with 3V's framework for dealing with big data back in 2001.
E
Edd Dumbill – Chair of O'Reilly's Strata and OSCON conferences. Blogs at eddology.com
Eric Kavanagh – CEO of The Bloor Group. Host of The Briefing Room and Information Management's DM Radio
F
Fern Halper, Ph.D – Partner & Hurwitz & Associates and co-author Hybrid Cloud for Dummies.
G
Gil Press – Launched the #BigData conversation. Blogs at whatsthebigdata.com and Infostory
Gregory Piatetsky – Editor of KDnuggets. Co-founded KDD and SIGKDD
H
Hilary Mason – Chief scientist @bitly. Blogs at hilarymason.com
J
Jake Porway – Founder and executive director of DataKind
James Gingerich – Sr. partner account manager, Sybase. Helps improve business operations through big data, mobile, cloud, analytics and social technologies
James Kobielus – Big data evangelist for IBM. Blogs at jkobielus.blogspot.com
Jeff Hammerbacher – Chief scientist at Cloudera. Blogs at jeffhammerbacher.com.
Jeff Kelly – Technology market analyst and journalist covering big data and business analytics at SiliconANGLE and The Wikibon Project
Jim Harris – Independent consultant and blogger at OCDQ blog
Justin Lovell – BI/big data principal consultant – AKA "The Integrator" (Microsoft/SAP). Principal lead at IS Partners
K
Kevin Weil – Director of Product for Revenue at Twitter. Former big data engineer
Krish Krishnan – CEO, Sixth Sense Advisors. Co-author of "Building the Unstructured Data Warehouse."
M
Manish Bhatt – Solution architect, interested in everything #BigData, including #NoSQL, #mongoDB, #Python, #Hadoop, #MachineLearning, #PredictiveAnalytics
Merv Adrian – Research VP with Gartner after three decades in the industry in consulting. Also writes an IT market strategy blog
Michael Driscoll – CEO @metamarkets. Big data, analytics and visualization.
Monica Rogati – Data scientist at LinkedIn. Turning data into stories and products
N
Neil Raden – CEO/principal analyst Hired Brains Inc. Co-author of "Smart (Enough) Systems".
P
Paul Philp – Co-founder and CEO at Lilikoi Data. Interested in big data and analytics, Hadoop and machine learning, SaaS, entrepreunership and venture capital
Peter Skomoroch – Principal data scientist at LinkedIn. Blogs about big data, machine learning and Hadoop at datawrangling.com
Philip (Flip) Kromer – Infochimps founder. Builds tools to organize, explore and comprehend massive data sources.
Philip Russom – Industry analyst for BI, DW, DI, DQ, MDM
Paul Zikopoulos – IBM exec with 16 books, 350+ articles and 10,000+ client briefings.
R
Russell Jurney – Data artist and writer. Blogs at Hortonworks.
S
Sid Probstein – Co-founder and CTO, Attivio. Futurist.
Stewart Townsend – Founder, bigdataweek.com. Head Business Development at DataSift.
T
Todd Lipcon – Cloudera engineer, Hadoop/HBase committer, former Erlang hacker
Troy Sadkowsky – Big data developer for Twitter research applications at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). Blogs at datascientists.net
V
Vincent Granville – Forbes top 20 big data influencer. Publisher of AnalyticBridge. Expert in data mining, predictive modeling, text mining and business analytics
W
William McKnight – CEO at McKnight Consulting Group (@mcknightconsult). Information management architect, strategist, leader, educator, speaker, author, blogger and mentor.
Y
Yves Mulkers – Data modeler and ETL expert at McKinsey Solutions. Owner and independent BI professional at Klym
Made it this far? Your prize is an extra special expert: Big Data Borat. He provides "learnings of big data for make nation of Kazakhstan #1 leading data scientist nation." Good stuff.
