Visit the KNIME Hall of Fame 21/22

Last July, we reached the end of the second cycle of the KNIME Contributor of the Month (COTM) awards. We are excited to introduce you to the COTM honorees for 2021-2022.

Among them we count academics, KNIME expert KNinjas, educators, component builders, social media influencers, data science authors, researchers, bloggers, and YouTubers. Here they are:

• Francisco Villarroel Órdenes, Assistant Professor of Marketing and Director of the MSc. in Marketing at LUISS Guido Carli University, Italy
• Malik Yousef, Head of Galilee Digital Health Research Center (GDH), Zefat Academic College, Israel
• Ashok Arnal, Professor at FORE School of Management, New Delhi, India
• Andrea De Mauro, Head of Data & Analytics at Vodafone and book author, Italy
• Christophe Molina, CEO @ PIKAÏROS and QSAR researcher, France
• Paul Wisnesky, Engineering Director and Software Architect , USA
• Brian Bates, Data Integration Engineer / Architect, Great Britain
• Bruno Ng, IT Manager, Montreal, Canada
• Ignacio Perez, Owner and Associate at IQuartil, Colombia
• Nick Rivera (aka Nicky Dee), Business Analyst at EMR and Youtuber, USA
• Tosin Adekanye, Data Scientist, Qatar
• John Emery, Principal Consultant at phData, USA

Tip: See who the COTMs were for 2020/2021 on the Hall of Fame page.

Every month, KNIME acknowledges a member from its community as a Contributor Of The Month (COTM), someone who has shown excellent technical skills and contributed to the improvement and education of data science with KNIME.

This contribution can take any form, such as educating the new generation of data scientists, providing technical help, writing, streaming, developing new nodes or components, or highlighting KNIME software features and use cases.

There are only a handful of such top experts around the world, and at the end of each cycle, they are collected and presented in the KNIME Hall of Fame.

Without further ado, let’s get to know them better!

Let’s start with the KNIME Educators Alliance. These educators and lecturers are passionate about teaching data science and using the open source low code KNIME software. They are committed to introducing scientists from all fields, especially those without programming backgrounds, to data science with KNIME Analytics Platform.

Francisco Villarroel Ordenes – COTM April 2022 – is an assistant professor of marketing and the director of the MSc. in Marketing program at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, Italy. An expert in marketing analytics and NLP, he has taught such topics using KNIME software at several universities. Together with a team of data scientists at KNIME, he developed a live repository, hosted on the KNIME Hub, for machine-learning-based solutions in marketing analytics, customer churn, sentiment analysis, automated image analysis, search engine optimization, and customer experience. An extensive analysis of this project is provided in his research paper “Machine learning for marketing on the KNIME Hub: The development of a live repository for marketing applications,” As an assistant professor, he is a strong proponent of KNIME in his lectures, and he uses it extensively in his classes and research work regarding marketing analytics.

Malik Yousef – COTM January 2022 – is the head of the Galilee Digital Health Research Center (GDH) at Zefat Academic College, Israel. Malik has impacted DNA, mRNA, and miRNA analysis, gene ontology, and molecular biology with his research, as confirmed by a long list of the top peer-reviewed scientific journals, books, and US patents. He has developed ML algorithms to predict mRNA and their targets, analyze gene expression, and integrate mRNA and miRNA expression profiles via machine learning. As a professor, he has made cutting-edge contributions in life sciences, and he uses KNIME actively in his research. Here is his KNIME Hub public space, and his interview with the KNIME team.

When you are designing a workflow and get stuck, these are the people who become the ray of hope. They are actively helping beginners and veterans alike on the KNIME Forum.

Brian Bates – COTM October 2021 – is a ubiquitous trusted presence in the KNIME Forum. In his first six months on the forum, he accumulated more favorited posts than anyone over the preceding year! When we asked Brian what motivates him, he said, “I get a lot of satisfaction out of the challenges presented on the forum and assisting others with their workflows. It's always nice to see a solution working for somebody where they've perhaps been struggling for a while.” Check out two of Brian's many components: Open File or Folder for quickly opening and checking on a file or folder in your KNIME workspace, and String Emoji Filter for removing emojis from emails or tweets.

Bruno Ng – COTM May 2022 – is a prolific member of the KNIME Forum and the KNIME Hub. He is well-known for his valuable answers on the Forum, as well as the many valuable workflows and components he’s contributed to the KNIME Hub. Bruno always engages other KNIMErs with the utmost courtesy and clarity. As of this writing, he has created 2.2k posts, received 3.5k favorites, and provided almost 250 solutions. You can see his stats on his forum page and his amazing KNIME Hub public space.

Christophe Molina – COTM June 2022 – is a life science researcher and an acclaimed international speaker. He is the co-author of several scientific papers on various QSAR topics, some of which you can admire here:

• ADME Prediction with KNIME: Prediction of Human Oral Bioavailability
• ADME prediction with KNIME: In Silico Aqueous Solubility
• Automated Framework for QSAR Modeling of Highly Imbalanced Data
• ADME prediction with KNIME: A retrospective contribution to the second “Solubility Challenge”
• Isometric Stratified Ensembles: Adaptive Applicability Domain and Consensus Classification of Colloidal Aggregation

Christophe is mostly known in the KNIME community for his active and resolutive presence on the Forum, where he proactively assists users. Statistics for his contributions are available on his summary page.

Ignacio Perez – COTM September 2021 – focuses his work around the Spanish-speaking KNIME community. He established and currently overviews the Spanish threads on the KNIME Forum, regularly hosts courses in Spanish, and provides Spanish translations for KNIME educational materials. Recently, he translated the “From Excel to KNIME” ebook into Spanish: "de Excel a KNIME Analytics Platform.” He is also a founder of IQuartil, and maintains a YouTube channel where he explains KNIME to the Spanish-speaking community.

This year we established the new journal on Medium, “Low Code for Advanced Data Science” for KNIME community members to share experiences. Years before, we started the KNIME TV channel on YouTube to share experiences. This category is reserved for those who have provided their main contributions to the KNIME community via blog posts and videos. All the material they have created has helped countless users learn and apply KNIME to a variety of use cases.

Paul Wisnesky – COTM March 2022 – has written numerous articles about applying KNIME software to many different use cases. Just check out his two "Making the Pass" articles on American football! There he explores whether he can teach his machine learning model when and how to throw the ball to a receiver in motion. Part 1 deals with Parameter Optimization with KNIME, and Part 2: Trains a Neural Network. There are many many more articles in his Medium catalog which are definitely worth a look.

Nick Rivera – COTM February 2022 – aka NickyDee on YouTube, has recorded many video tutorials, representing an extensive, organized, easy-to-digest, and useful resource for both newbies and experts to progress in their knowledge of KNIME. This includes explorations of lookup IDs, pivoting and unpivoting, aggregations, conditional math, date and time operations, excel function translations, and many more data transformations and ETL operations. Here is the link to his channel, where he covers most aspects of data manipulation operations with KNIME.

Some of us have become influencers – not really the stereotypical ones occupied with fashion and food, but niche influencers dealing with data, statistics, and algorithms. Whatever they write, post, or comment instantly acquires a long echo and propagates to all corners of the world.

Tosin Adekanye – COTM August 2021 – started using KNIME just recently. She has made it her mission to divulge her knowledge and experience in data science to all interested professionals, removing the coding barrier and focusing on concepts. She has been working on data dealing with the FIFA Arab cup, financial transactions, UFO sightings, and fraud detection. She launched the “30 Days of KNIME” series on YouTube. She’s published her work in “Low Code for Advanced Data Science,” starred in the second and fifth episodes of “My Data Guest,” and of course, she’s posted all her progress on her social media channels.

Andrea De Mauro – COTM December 2021 – has had a multifaceted career. He’s been a business data analyst, a data scientist, a data engineer, a data science manager, a university professor, a blogger, a social media influencer, and an author. Throughout his career, KNIME has been his reliable companion. His latest book, Data Analytics Made Easy, published by Packt in 2021, shows how to use machine learning and data science techniques in the business context without writing any code. He is also a social media influencer, with a high number of data professional followers, and a strong proponent of low-code and KNIME software.

John Emery – COTM July 2022 – is the first certified trainer for KNIME software (check out his badge), a respected speaker at data science events, and an author of several blog posts. Check his articles about parsing and analyzing PDF documents, running baseball hitting streak simulations, or cracking Wordle, or his talk about extracting data from a PDF document. He is currently part of the organizing board of the Data Connect North America series of events.

These are the members of the KNIME community who have contributed nodes or components to be used by others within the KNIME Analytics Platform. Each component is tailored for a specific task and available on the KNIME Hub.

Ashok Harnal – COTM November 2021 – has created components about automated feature engineering. They provide good examples on how to bundle and share Python scripts without dependency issues, and are available on his KNIME Hub profile with instructions on how to use them in practice. Ashok’s components have been the most downloaded from the KNIME Hub for many months now.

Congratulations to the KNIME COTM awardees for the year 2021/2022!

If you know a KNIME user – a fan, colleague, family member, yourself – who is contributing to the growth of the community, you can nominate them for Contributor of the Month via the COTM Candidate Proposal form.