Tom Davenport

President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology & Management

• Specialties: Business process reengineering, knowledge management, enterprise systems, analytics
• Conferences: Keynote Speaker, 2014 Informs Business Analytics & Operations Research, Keynote Speaker, 2014 Vertica Big Data Conference
• Books: Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, Strategic Management in the Innovation Economy: Strategic Approache..., Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances and Results f..., Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know

Hod Lipson

Associate Professor, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

• Specialties: Evolutionary robotics, design automation, rapid prototyping, artificial life, self-assembly
• Notoriety: Named one of Forbes’ World’s Most Powerful Data Scientists
• Books: Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing

Alex Pentland

Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, Director of Human Dynamics Lab, Director of MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program

• Specialties: Computational social science, organizational engineering, mobile computing
• Notoriety: Named one of Forbes’ World’s Most Powerful Data Scientists in 2014
• Projects: Social Physics
• Books: Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread — The Lessons from a New Science, Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World

Matei Zaharia

Founder of Databricks, Assistant Professor in EECS (in 2014 academic year)

• Specialties: Tools for large-scale data-intensive computing
• Conferences: Strata 2014 Faster and Smarter Big Data Analysis with BlinkDB, MLbase, GraphX, ...
• Projects: Spark, Shark, Mesos, other systems for big-data scheduling and coordination

Hector Garcia-Molina

Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Departments

• Specialties: Distributed computing systems, digital libraries, database systems
• Conference: IEEE BigData 2013, Using Crowdsourcing for Data Analytics
• Projects: Stanford Digital Library Project
• Books: Database Systems: The Complete Book, Database System Implementation

James Matheson

Consulting Professor, Stanford School of Engineering

• Specialties: Management science and engineering
• Conferences: 2014 Informs Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Rese...
• Projects: SmartOrg
• Books: The Smart Organization: Creating Value Through Strategic R&D
• On big data’s impact on our lives: “Exploring data can be revealing. However, big data is not so good for decision-making. We have asked executives to look back at important decisions to see how much more data about the past would have helped, versus better judgements about the future. We get about 30% from past data and 70% from better judgements. Also, for big decisions it may be more important to adapt well and quickly as the future unfolds. So good data about the present and near past may loom in importance. Analysis of decision can direct data searches to the most beneficial areas. Of course, sometimes just playing with the data can produce valuable insights, but that is serendipity.”

Chris Re

Assistant Professor, Computer Science

• Specialties: Theoretical and practical problems in data management
• Conferences: Strata 2014, Thorn in the Side of Big Data: Too Few Artists
• Projects: Hazy

Sebastian Thrun

Research Professor, Google Fellow, co-founder of Udacity

• Specialties: Robotics, AI
• Conferences: Strata 2014, Closing the Job Skills Gap: One Class at a Time; DataBeat 2014
• Projects: Google’s Self-Driving Car, Google Glass,Udacity
• Books: Probabilistic Robots, Robots: Science and Systems I
• Recommendation for learning about big data: “Udacity has a data science track built by industry. Leading companies like Cloudera, Facebook, and MongoDB have contributed courses. Learn from the leading experts in the world. All content is accessible for free, and every student can sign up for our classes.”

Joshua Bloom

Professor of Astronomy

• Specialties: Astrophysics, Python for data science
• Conferences: Strata 2014, Overcoming the Barriers to Production-Ready Machine-Learning Workflows
• Projects: wise.io

Michael J. Franklin

Professor of Computer Science

• Specialties: Large-scale data management infrastructure and applications
• Conferences: IEEE BigData 2013, The Berkeley Data Analysis Stack: Present and Future
• Projects: AMPLab, MLbase, CrowdDB

Read full list at http://www.mastersindatascience.org/blog/21-thought-leader-professo...