Machine Learning and Data Science Experts to Follow

20 machine learning and data science experts whose courses, libraries, books and research are worth following, with their current roles checked against public sources.

These are 20 people whose machine learning and data science work you can learn from directly: courses, libraries, books, papers and newsletters. Every role below was checked against current public sources in November 2026, and each person has public work from 2025 or 2026.

Researchers who built the field

Geoffrey Hinton

Hinton is an emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Toronto and worked half-time at Google from 2013 to 2023 ^[1]. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks ^[2].

Yoshua Bengio

Bengio is a full professor at Université de Montréal, founder and scientific advisor of Mila, and co-president and scientific director of LawZero ^[3]. He led the International AI Safety Report 2026, written by more than 100 AI experts ^[4].

Yann LeCun

LeCun left his role as Meta's Chief AI Scientist and confirmed his new startup, AMI Labs, in December 2025 ^[5]. He is Executive Chairman of AMI Labs and a professor of computer science at New York University ^[6].

Fei-Fei Li

Li is the Sequoia Capital Professor at Stanford and a senior fellow at Stanford HAI ^[7]. Her company, World Labs, made its world model Marble available to everyone in November 2025 ^[8].

Teachers and course builders

Andrew Ng

Ng founded DeepLearning.AI, which says it has trained more than seven million learners, and is an adjunct professor at Stanford ^[9]. He writes a weekly letter in The Batch ^[10].

Jeremy Howard

Howard created the fast.ai deep learning course and the ULMFiT method, and is founding CEO of Answer.AI ^[11][12].

Rachel Thomas

Thomas co-founded fast.ai and was founding director of the USF Center for Applied Data Ethics ^[11]. At the end of 2025 she re-joined fast.ai, which is now part of Answer.AI ^[13].

Andrej Karpathy

Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI, makes educational videos on AI ^[14]. In May 2026 he joined Anthropic's pre-training team ^[15].

Sebastian Raschka

Raschka is an LLM research engineer and the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) ^[16]. Manning published his Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch) in June 2026 ^[17].

Library and tool builders

François Chollet

Chollet created the Keras deep learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark, and co-founded the AI lab Ndea with Mike Knoop ^[18]. He co-authored the ARC Prize 2025 technical report, posted in January 2026 ^[19].

Hadley Wickham

Wickham is chief scientist at Posit, where he leads the tidyverse team ^[20]. He co-wrote R for Data Science, now in its second edition ^[21].

Wes McKinney

McKinney wrote Python for Data Analysis and is founder of Kenn Software and a principal architect at Posit ^[22]. The book's third edition is available free online ^[23].

Thomas Wolf

Wolf is co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face and helped build its open-source Transformers and Datasets libraries ^[24][25].

Jason Liu

Liu created Instructor, a Python library for structured LLM outputs, and works on OpenAI's Codex team ^[26][27].

Practitioners on evals and production AI

Hamel Husain

Husain has worked on machine learning at Airbnb and GitHub ^[28]. He co-teaches AI Evals for Engineers and PMs with Shreya Shankar ^[29].

Chip Huyen

Huyen works on bringing AI to production and wrote AI Engineering, published by O'Reilly in 2025 ^[30][31].

Data science leaders

Hilary Mason

Mason was chief scientist at bitly and founded Fast Forward Labs, which Cloudera acquired in 2017 ^[32]. She gave the opening keynote at QCon AI New York 2025 ^[33].

DJ Patil

Patil was appointed by President Obama as the first US Chief Data Scientist ^[34]. He is a Dean's Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's College of Computing, Data Science, and Society and a general partner at GreatPoint Ventures ^[34].

Cassie Kozyrkov

Kozyrkov was Google's first Chief Decision Scientist and works on decision intelligence ^[35]. She writes the Decision Intelligence newsletter ^[36].

Kirk Borne

Borne was data archive project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope and principal data scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton ^[37]. In 2025 he spoke at Valdosta State University on data science, AI and entrepreneurship ^[38].

How we chose

We picked people whose work you can use: courses, libraries, books, papers and talks. Each person needed public work dated 2025 or 2026 and a current role confirmed by at least two public sources. Follower counts played no part. To suggest someone, use the nominate page.

Related: AI influencers to follow, the best AI podcasts and the Innovators directory.

Sources

1. Geoffrey Hinton — University of Toronto
2. Geoffrey Hinton, facts — Nobel Prize (2024)
3. Profile — Yoshua Bengio
4. International AI Safety Report 2026 — International AI Safety Report (February 2026)
5. Yann LeCun confirms his new world model startup — TechCrunch (December 2025)
6. Yann LeCun's home page — Yann LeCun
7. Fei-Fei Li — Stanford Profiles
8. Marble — World Labs (November 2025)
9. Andrew Ng — andrewng.org
10. Letters from Andrew Ng — The Batch, DeepLearning.AI
11. About — fast.ai
12. Jeremy Howard — jeremy.fast.ai
13. Blog post — Rachel Thomas (October 2026)
14. Andrej Karpathy — karpathy.ai
15. Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic's pre-training team — TechCrunch (May 2026)
16. Sebastian Raschka — sebastianraschka.com
17. Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch) — Manning (June 2026)
18. About Ndea — Ndea
19. ARC Prize 2025: Technical Report — arXiv (January 2026)
20. Hadley Wickham — hadley.nz
21. R for Data Science (2nd edition) — r4ds.hadley.nz
22. Wes McKinney — wesmckinney.com
23. Python for Data Analysis, 3E — Wes McKinney
24. Thomas Wolf — thomwolf.io
25. Thomas Wolf — HumanX speaker page (2026)
26. Jason Liu — jxnl.co
27. Instructor — GitHub
28. Hamel Husain — hamel.dev
29. AI Evals for Engineers and PMs — Maven
30. Chip Huyen — huyenchip.com
31. AI Engineering — GitHub
32. About — Hilary Mason
33. Speaking — Hilary Mason
34. DJ Patil — UC Berkeley CDSS
35. Cassie Kozyrkov — Kozyr
36. Decision Intelligence archive — Cassie Kozyrkov
37. Kirk Borne at Valdosta State — Valdosta Daily Times (January 2025)
38. Kirk Borne talks innovation and business transformation at VSU — Valdosta State University (January 2025)