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The Machine Learning community is busy sharing new research and insights on Twitter, and this is an extensive list of recommended AI researchers and pioneers to follow.
Artificial intelligence is advancing at a rocket’s pace, and every year the field looks fundamentally different than the year before. It’s often difficult to keep up with all the news and exciting results. The best way I’ve found is to follow the machine learning community on Twitter. This community lives on Twitter, sharing new research and insights, opinions, jokes, and just generally supporting each other. Keeping track of advancements in AI is not only fun but will also help in interviews by demonstrating to hiring managers your investment in the field.
To get you started following the machine learning community, here’s a fairly extensive list of AI researchers and pioneers I’m following.
The AI Pioneers
First up are pioneers of the current age of artificial intelligence. Sebastian Thrun is a Stanford professor, the founder of Google X and co-founder of Udacity, and a true pioneer in autonomous vehicles. Andrew Ng is also a professor at Stanford, the co-founder of Google Brain, and the former head of AI at Baidu. Sticking with Stanford professors, Dr. Fei-Fei Li studies computer vision and is currently the chief scientist of AI for Google Cloud Platform. Yann LeCun, jointly at Facebook and NYU, demonstrated the power of convolutional neural networks leading to the current revolution in AI. Finally, Jeff Dean, the current Head of Artificial Intelligence at Google, was instrumental in developing TensorFlow, which brought the power of deep learning to the masses.
Amazing Udacity Collaborators
Next up, the many friends of Udacity who have worked with us to bring you excellent AI content. Ian Goodfellow, the inventor of generative adversarial networks (GANs), teaches the theory and concepts behind these revolutionary deep learning models in our deep learning program. Andrew Trask, also featured in our deep learning program, is the leader of OpenMined and a machine learning PhD student at Oxford. Melody Guan, formerly a researcher at Google Brain, is now a machine learning PhD student at Stanford, and is on our AI advisory board. Arthur Juliani is a deep reinforcement learning researcher at Unity who worked with us on our new Deep Reinforcement Learning Nanodegree program. Laura Montoya, also on our advisory board, is the founder of Accel.AI, and is the co-chair of the LatinX in AI Coalition.
The Best Writers on Machine Learning
The next three I consider to be some of the best writers on machine learning. Andrej Karpathy, now the Director of AI at Tesla, is famous for his Stanford course on deep learning. His blog posts on recurrent networks and deep reinforcement learning are great places to start getting into deep learning. Chris Olah wrote the best explanation of LSTM models, and is a founder and author at Distill, a journal devoted to clear explanations of deep learning research. Sebastian Ruder writes about NLP and other machine learning topics, including the best overview of gradient descent optimization methods you’ll find online.
On the Ethics of AI
There is also a lot of work being done around the ethics of AI. Two luminaries working in this field are Timnit Gebru and Joy Buolamwini. Timnit studied at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, and recently was doing postdoctoral work in Microsoft’s Fairness Transparency Accountability and Ethics in AI (FATE) group. Joy is a machine learning researcher in the MIT Media Lab and worked on the Gender Shades project along with Timnit. She also founded and leads the Algorithmic Justice League to address bias in machine learning. For work on ethics in industry, check out Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist who leads the Responsible AI team at Accenture.
Groups and Organizations
Other than individual people, you can also follow groups and organizations involved in AI research. The big three that are pushing AI technology forward are OpenAI, DeepMind, and GoogleBrain/GoogleAI. You can also find great work out of academia at Stanford, UC Berkeley (my alma mater), and MIT.
More Great AI Minds
- Francois Cholet: Creator of Keras
- Soumith Chintala: Creator of PyTorch
- Catherine Olsson: Research Engineer at Google Brain
- Zachary Lipton: Assistant Professor in Machine Learning at Carnegie-Mellon
- Shreya Shankar: AI Researcher, Stanford
- Douglas Eck: Principal Research Scientist, Google Brain
- Chelsea Finn: Research Scientist at GoogleAI (and soon-to-be professor at Stanford)
- David Ha: Research Scientist at Google Brain Tokyo
Our Instructors
Finally, you can also follow some of your favorite instructors from Udacity’s School of AI, including yours truly (@MatDrinksTea). You’ll find Cezanne Camacho, the lead instructor for our deep learning and computer vision programs, and Alexis Cook, the lead instructor for the deep reinforcement learning program. Also, be sure to follow Luis Serrano, who has taught machine learning, deep learning, NLP, and much more.
AI is moving fast, and social media is a great way to keep up. Join the global community of machine learning and AI enthusiasts today. You can follow and engage with these accounts by subscribing to our Twitter list of the AI experts mentioned here. Have suggestions of your own? Let us know! And when you’re ready to advance a career in this incredible space, please visit our School of Artificial Intelligence to learn about all our offerings.
