This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

I was recently asked if I had a list of favorite A.I. thought leaders that I recommended following on Twitter. I didn’t, but that spurred the idea of today’s episode in which I’ll provide you with my ten picks.

My picks aren’t in a particular order overall, but #1 does happen to be my #1 favorite data scientist, and that’s Andrej Karpathy. Andrej is today the Director of A.I. at Tesla, but I’ve been a huge fan since 2016 when I came across his energetic and exceptionally well-presented Stanford CS231n course lectures on convolutional neural networks for machine vision, which are available on YouTube. Andrej is quite active on Twitter, mostly about machine learning but also about other broadly interesting or socially-impactful topics.

Next is Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University and Chief A.I. Scientist at Facebook (er, I mean Meta) who was jointly awarded the 2018 Turing Award–comparable to a Nobel Prize but for computer science–for his work on deep learning. Like Andrej, Yann is quite active on Twitter.

My third pick is someone who was another recipient of the 2018 Turing Award for deep learning alongside Yann. and that’s Geoff Hinton. Geoff is an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto and leads the Google Brain group in Canada. In his two years on Twitter, Geoff has only tweeted 52 times but they’re tweets that you don’t want to miss.

Another academic heavyweight worth following is Fei-Fei Li, who co-directs two prominent groups at Stanford University: the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the Vision and Learning Lab.

Number five is Andrew Ng, who also works at Stanford as an adjunct member of the computer science faculty. Andrew co-founded the learning platform Coursera and is renowned for his popular video tutorials on machine learning. Andrew has the largest Twitter following of any of the A.I. leaders I’m covering in today’s episode with over 600k.

Number six is someone who had Andrew Ng as his PhD supervisor and that’s Pieter Abbeel. We were honored to have Pieter as the guest on episode #503 of the SuperDataScience podcast for a deeply technical and deeply fascinating episode. As a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Pieter is the world’s most preeminent researcher on Deep Reinforcement Learning. He’s also the founder of Covariant.ai, which brings his research into real-world A.I. robotics applications.

Speaking of real-world applications of A.I., number seven is Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of DeepMind. DeepMind is a company that was acquired by Google and that has the explicit mission of bringing about AGI or Artificial General Intelligence — an algorithm that has the capacity to learn as broadly as an adult human. Check out episode #438 for more on AGI and DeepMind in particular.

Beyond deep reinforcement learning, if you have an interest in natural language processing then Christopher Manning, an amicable Stanford professor who specializes in this area, is my top suggestion for you.

My penultimate pick is Hilary Mason, a commercial machine learning leader based out of New York who is extremely active on Twitter. She’s Tweeted 20k times, more than twice as much as anyone else I’ve mentioned in today’s episode.

My tenth and final pick is Wes McKinney, a prominent open-source software developer who perhaps most famously devised the ubiquitous pandas library amongst countless other extraordinary contributions to the data science community. Wes was recently our guest on episode #523 and it is a technical one on what’s possible with analytical computing today and what’s to come in the future. Wes is highly active on Twitter so you can follow him there for the latest on the open-source libraries he’s releasing into the world.

Alongside these ten A.I. giants, I am an absolute minnow but if you’d nevertheless like to stay up to date on the latest SuperDataScience interviews, episodes, and my free machine learning tutorials on YouTube, then you are welcome to follow me on Twitter too. SuperDataScience also has its own Twitter.

I hope some of my social media suggestions prove valuable to you in your data science journey!

That’s it for today. Keep on rockin’ it out there folks and catch you on another round of SuperDataScience very soon.