To get the best out of social media, it really helps to follow the right people to stay informed on a variety of topics and interests – including statistics!
It allows you the kind of access to statisticians that was previously impossible. Now you can chat directly with the statisticians you follow and speak directly to previously inaccessible people.
I know it’s true, because I did it!
I reached out on Twitter to a bunch of influential, famous, and entertaining stats profs, data nerds, and published Data Science experts and asked them to contribute to a book I was working on. And you know what? These cool cats replied and did just that!
All of these guys post regularly on a variety of topics, mostly data but funny stuff too, and I enjoy engaging with them on Twitter and other social media outlets.
I recommend you follow them and lighten up your feed too!
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You can find further details in our TCs
Brian Caffo
Who Are They?
Professor of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
What Do They Do?
Brian works in the fields of computational statistics and neuroinformatics, and teaches five open online courses on Coursera; Mathematical Biostatistics Boot Camp (1 & 2), Statistical Inference, Regression Models and Developing Data Products.
What Can You Expect From Them?
He is the author of Regression Models for Data Science in R, Statistical Inference for Data Science and Developing Data Products in R.
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Who Are They?
Senior Quantitative Analyst at YouTube and co-founder of OpenIntro.
What Do They Do?
David co-founded OpenIntro, a non-profit that has saved students $1.5 million per year by providing access to open-source textbooks, and focuses his time on scaling OpenIntro into new subjects. He is a data scientist in the San Francisco Bay Area for YouTube, where he works on Trust and Safety and related topics.
What Can You Expect From Them?
Follow @OpenIntroOrg on Twitter for occasional updates on OpenIntro's expansion plans and progress.
Who Are They?
Author and Professor of biostatistics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine at Nashville.
What Do They Do?
Frank Harrell has devoted his career to the study of patient outcomes in the development of accurate prognostic and diagnostic models. His research relates to (amongst many other things) development of reliable statistical models, quantifying predictive accuracy, modeling strategies model validation methods, statistical graphics, and statistical reporting.
What Can You Expect From Them?
Check out Prof. Harrell’s latest book Regression Modeling Strategies: With Applications to Linear Models, Logistic and Ordinal Regression, and Survival Analysis
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Who Are They?
Senior Developer Advocate at Rasa.
What Do They Do?
Rachael helps developers build and deploy conversational AI applications. These days she streams livecoding on Twitch, is one of the organisers of R-Ladies Seattle and moderates the LingStatsChat Slack channel, a place for friendly discussion & help on linguistic and statistical topics.
What Can You Expect From Them?
You can join the livecoding on Twitch, check out R-Ladies Seattle or join the LingStatsChat Slack channel.
Who Are They?
Software Engineer at Slack and founder of the Apache Crunch project
What Do They Do?
Prior to Slack, he built and led data science teams at Cloudera and Google. He is the founder of the Apache Crunch project and co-authored an O’Reilly book on advanced analytics with Apache Spark.
In May of 2012, he tweeted a pithy definition of a data scientist as someone who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician, and his Twitter mentions have never been the same.
What Can You Expect From Them?
You can get a great introduction to Josh in his YouTube video How to Play Well With Others, where he introduces the hilarious concept of The Infinite Loop of Sadness. You really must watch it! You can also get your copy of Josh’s book Advanced Analytics with Spark: Patterns for Learning from Data at Scale.
7 Awesome Statisticians to follow on Social Media - #statistician #dataguru @chi2innovations
Who Are They?
New York quant risk manager and co-author of the R Cookbook
What Do They Do?
In his own words, James says that he’s “the guy who can build a Monte Carlo model, help parallelize the model to run on Amazon’s cloud services and then stand in front of a group of business leaders and put the work in context where everyone understands. My super power is thinking probabilistically, understanding risk, and communicating clearly”.
What Can You Expect From Them?
You can get your copy of Long’s book R Cookbook: Proven Recipes for Data Analysis, Statistics, and Graphics.
Diana Thomas
Who Are They?
Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at West Point Military Academy.
What Do They Do?
She has published over 130 peer-reviewed articles in exercise, fitness, nutrition, and body weight regulation relying on diverse mathematical methods ranging from differential equations to machine learning. Some of the questions she is investigating are “Why do individuals not lose weight during exercise?”, “How can we objectively monitor diet in humans?”, and “Does body shape and posture predict injury?”
What Can You Expect From Them?
You can follow Diana on Twitter here: @MathArmy
Related Resources
Apart from being active in social media (have you followed them all yet?), all these data geeks and statisticians have written loads of books. Check them out at Amazon (big fat, hairy, scary affiliate links):
Other Posts in This Series
When I reached out to data gurus, statisticians and Data Scientists on Twitter, I got loads of responses - too many, in fact, to list in this one post.
So I created a series of posts instead, and you can check them all out here:
