In deep learning, Geoff Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Andrew Ng are some of the super star names you will often hear.<p>Vladimir Vapnik invented the support vector machine and has made huge contributions to statistical learning theory.<p>Anything written by Zoubin Ghahramani from Cambridge is worth reading, as well as his colleague Carl Rasmussen, the author of THE book on Gaussian processes.<p>Bernhard Schölkopf is another legend in the field, as well as Alex J. Smola, both of whom have done incredible work in kernel methods.<p>Michael Jordan (the one from Berkeley!) is a legend in the field and an absolute genius.<p>There is of course also David Blei, Kevin Murphy, Chris Bishop, Brendan Frey, Nando de Freitas, Neil Lawrence, etc.<p>The list really does go on and on of people doing some incredible work - the sample I gave doesn't even scratch the surface.