Fortune's maiden 'Big Data All-Stars' lists the 20 extraordinary people who are "the best at connecting the dots and digging deep."
Among the 20 is Arun Murthy, who co-founded business computer software company Hortonworks.
Murthy started off at Yahoo when Hadoop, the open-source storage and processing software that powers much of the web's big data, was an early prototype.
His team's mission was to scale it for Yahoo's web search and Murthy helped develop a resource and workload management system called YARN that acts as a sort of operating system for Hadoop, Fotune said.
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As a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University, Gupta became fascinated by the art of summarisation, which is extracting meaning from text without actually reading the text.
Gupta was working at Google when she started researching a trip using Airbnb.
The possibilities Airbnb's data offered fascinated her and in the four months at the room rental service company, overhauled and improved their search engines and is currently working on condensing all of Airbnb's listings to create summaries to enable users to understand different cities' vibes, the publication said.
She is the brains behind American Express 'MyOffers' which aims to give members "what they want when they need it."
She is also responsible for a tool that allows merchants to compare their annual performance.
Next on the list is Vijay Subramanian, Chief Analytics Officer at Rent the Runway, an online service that provides designer dress and accessory rentals.
Subramanian built a model to estimate missed demand, product longevity, and occasion usage for the company's inventory-a huge cost-saver for a company that buys truckloads of dresses and accessories from fashion designers every season to rent to customers.