AI Influencers 2017: Top 30 people in AI you should follow on Twitter

By | 5 minute read | February 10, 2017

Artificial intelligence has been a dream in technology ever since Alan Turing first wrote his seminal paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Now, thanks to advances in hardware power and algorithm design, AI is a growth industry – and it has no shortage of vocal advocates.

These are some of the most vocal and influential leaders working on artificial intelligence, robotics, chat bots, virtual reality, the ethics of autonomous software and vehicles and more. Be sure to follow them on Twitter to stay updated on the news and trends that are changing the world:

Here are the top 30 people in AI you should follow on Twitter (in alphabetical order):

1. Nathan Benaich (@NathanBenaich) – Tech investor with expertise in AI, previously a Partner at Playfair Capital and research scientist at the University of Cambridge. Organizes the London AI meet up and the annual Research and Applied AI Summit.

2. Joanna Bryson (@j2bryson) – Computer scientist at the University of Bath, and an affiliate at the Princeton Center for Information Technology. She has expertise in designing intelligent systems into working AI systems to help understand natural intelligence.

3. Alex Champandard (@alexjc) – Senior gaming AI programmer, and founder of Creative.AI, a project that explores how AI can help to perform perform creative tasks. Also directs the nucl.ai conference that helps creative industries use AI.

4. Soumith Chintala (@soumithchintala) – An AI researcher at Facebook, who also works on open-source software for machine learning.

5. Adam Coates (@adampaulcoates) – Director of the Silicon Valley AI Lab for giant Chinese conglomerate Baidu. Background at Stanford, where he focused on machine learning, perception and vision.

6. The CyberCode Twins (@cybercodetwins) –  Alumni, HACKcelerator. America and Penelope Lopez are known as the “The CyberCode Twins.” The twin sisters are on a mission to make communities safer thru wearable tech and mobile apps. Follow their journey on Twitter and on their Youtube channel.

7. Jana Eggers (@jeggers) – Math and computer science grad, and CEO at Nara Logics, which builds AI systems to help companies make decisions. Spent time researching supercomputers at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

8. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) – Dr. Li is a professor of AI at ), director of Stanford’s AI Lab, chief scientist of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning at Google Cloud, and the co-founder/chair of . She has published over 150 scientific papers in top-tier journals and built ImageNet, a 15 million images dataset that contributed to the latest developments in deep learning.

9. Martin Ford (@MFordFuture) – Futurist and author of Rise of the Robots, a New York Times bestseller about technology and its threat to jobs.

10. Adam Geitgey (@ageitgey) – Director of engineering at Groupon and passionate artificial intelligence expert. Follow him for tweets on everything from computer vision to machine learning.

11. John C. Havens (@johnchavens) – Executive director of the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems. He is also the author of Heartificial Intelligence, a book about building humanity into machines.

12. J.J Kardwell (@jjkardwell) – Kardwell is a serial tech investor who is now CEO of predictive marketing company EverString, which uses AI to drive marketing decisions.

13. David Kenny: (@davidwkenny) – David Kenny is senior vice president, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, spearheading the Watson technology platform development, as well as optimizing IBM’s public cloud for data and cognitive workloads.

14. Tessa Lau (@tessalau) – CTO and ‘chief robot whisperer’ at Savioke, a company that makes robots for the services industry.

15. Dr Angelica Lim (@petitegeek) – Canadian computer scientist with a Ph.D. in AI and emotions. She builds software for SoftBank Robotics’ Pepper robot.

16. Satya Mallick (@LearnOpenCV) – This tech entrepreneur has a Ph.D. in computer vision and machine learning, and is also co-founder at TaaZ, a company that applies vision technology to choosing beauty and fashion images.

17. Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) – Marcus directs the AI Labs at Uber, which is using AI in everything from self-driving cars to dynamic ride scheduling. He is also professor of psychology and neural science at NYU.

18. Chris Messina: (@chrismessina) – Chris Messina has spent a decade working on social technologies snd startups. In 2004, he helped organize the grassroots movement that propelled Mozilla Firefox to its first 100 million downloads. In 2007, he brought the hashtag to Twitter, changing the social media platform forever. During his time at Google he lead the creation of Google Developers as brand and the central hub for all related tools, services, and documentation. He also lead the efforts to design Google+’s publisher platform offerings, including the +1 button. Most recently, Messina was the developer experience lead at Uber where he championed chatbots and the developer platform to promote Uber API integrations.

19. Elon Musk (@elonmusk) – Tech rockstar and founder of Tesla and SpaceX, but also non-profit AI research company OpenAI, which seeks to advance AI in a way that benefits humankind, without necessarily seeking financial returns.

20. Dr Andy Pardoe (@DrAndyPardoe) – UK-based cognitive computing consultant and founder of Informed.AI group, a community of websites that promotes AI knowledge.

21. Alec Radford (@AlecRad) – Machine learning developer and researcher at OpenAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence non-profit. Also co-founded Indico.io, a company that sells a software product for extracting meaningful insights from data such as text and images.

22. Delip Rao (@deliprao) – Founder of machine learning consultancy Joostware and former AI research scientist at Amazon working on the Alexa initiative. Also handled AI problems as an engineer atTwitter.

23. Dr Roman Yampolskiy (@romanyam) – Associate professor at the University of Louisville, and author of Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach.

24. Gideon Rosenblatt (@gideonro) – Former ecommerce entrepreneur and now author at The Vital Edge, which covers what the world will look like in an age of intelligent machines.

25. Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford) – Adam Rutherford is a scientist, writer and broadcaster. He has written extensively on science, religion and film for The Guardian, and has written and presented programmes for BBC television, including The Cell on the history of biology, The Gene Code, and an episode of the flagship science show Horizon called Playing God on the rise of synthetic biology. His first book, Creation, is effectively the prequel and sequel to evolution covering the origin of life and synthetic biology.

26. Matt Schlicht (@MattPRD) – Octane AI was founded in 2016 by Y Combinator alum, former Ustream product manager, 2x Forbes 30 Under 30, and Chatbots Magazine creator Matt Schlicht; former Mashable co-editor and editor-at-large, CNET columnist, venture capitalist, Forbes 30 under 30, and Captivology author Ben Parr; and Omegle creator and owner Leif K-Brooks. Octane AI’s lead investor is Evernote founder Phil Libin at General Catalyst.

27. Murray Shanahan (@mpshanahan) – Professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London. Interested in AI, robotics and consciousness.

28. Amir Shevat (@ashevat) – Head of Developer Relations @Slack, author of “Designing Bots” and an expert on bots and virtual agents. Shevat was the global Startup Outreach lead in Google Developer Relations (g.co/launch). Previously, he led Google Campus Tel Aviv and was the co founder of several startups.

29. Resh Sidhu (@webkitten)  – Resh is one of the most well-regarded names in virtual reality. Her most recent work is the groundbreaking Fantastic Beasts VR experience (working with with Warner’s, Google and J.K. Rowling) that launched on Google’s Daydream Headset. She’s part of the award-winning Framestore’s virtual reality studio.

30. Adelyn Zhou (@adelynzhou) – Adelyn Zhou is a seasoned technology leader with experience at Nextdoor, Eventbrite and Amazon. She has been recognized as one of the top 50 people in growth as well as one of the top people in bots / AI. She is a leader in the largest bot community of 23,000 members.

IBM Watson is working with businesses, scientists, researchers, and governments to outthink our biggest challenges with AI, machine learning and cognitive technologies that are more accessible than ever to every business, large or small. To learn more about Watson’s cognitive solutions and APIs read more on this blog or sign up for a free trial on our website.

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