Contributors of the Month - Hall of Fame

If you’ve read any threads on the KNIME forum lately, chances are you’ve run across Gene Feigel (or @rfeigel as he’s better known there). He’s recently crossed the threshold of more than 100 solutions provided, but he’s also a regular participant in Just KNIME It challenges, and has provided valuable feedback as a tester for upcoming KNIME Analytics Platform releases through the White Hat Hacker program.

Gene freely gives his time to improve both the quality of our community, as well as KNIME software overall - which is why we’re thrilled to honor him as the COTM for May 2025!

Felipe Henrique is a consulting accountant in Brazil working at the intersection of tax and technology. On his LinkedIn account, he frequently uploads videos and posts highlighting his use of KNIME in areas like SQL processing, ETL, visualization, and tax automation tasks. Felipe is always willing to happily answer a question or dig a little deeper, and for his willingness and diligence in sharing his experience with other tax professionals, we are happy to honor Felipe as the COTM for April 2025!

This month we highlight the contributions of Dr. Lingbo Liu, a research associate at Harvard University’s Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA). Dr Liu leads the Spatial Data Lab project at the CGA, focusing on the development of advanced geospatial models and an open-source visual programming platform for GeoAI research, as well as training programs to democratize geospatial data science. As part of that work, he and his team have released (and are continuing to actively develop) the Geospatial Analytics Extension for KNIME.

This month we celebrate three of our 2024 Just KNIME It (JKI) KNinjas - Toshiyuki Ohfusa, Takanobu Araki, and Yuki Mizukami. Coincidentally, all three are involved with drug discovery research in Japan, but they were selected for their excellent workflow building skill demonstrated throughout each of the 30 challenges presented this year in the JKI program. Check out some of their innovative JKI solutions on the KNIME Community Hub in the links above, and be sure to join the upcoming JKI season 4 - maybe next year the KNinja will be you!

This month we have twin awardees from the Twin Cities of Minnesota - Pedro Medina of Haystack Data Solutions, and Nick Haylund of phData. Both Pedro and Nick have been instrumental in organizing KNIME Data Connect events in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area, and have been involved in other ways besides. Pedro’s My Data Guest appearance was a highlight, he’s featured articles about KNIME in his newsletter, and has been a helpful presence on the KNIME forum. Nick, meanwhile, got the phData team involved in the creation of the Alteryx to KNIME Cheatsheet, a key reference for the community.

Sometimes it takes a team  - thanks to both Pedro and Nick for their contributions!

Fabiola Martina, our inductee for December 2024, is an Operational Excellence Manager at Siemens Healthineers in the US. At her company, she served as host for interns from Oklahoma State University, winners of a KNIME student challenge there. She also offered her expertise in a panel discussion at a recent KNIME Summit, and you’ll be able to catch her in an upcoming episode of our podcast, My Data Guest. For her efforts as a key liaison for KNIME between academia and industry, we’re happy to recognize her this month.

Martin Dieste, our November 2024 inductee, has recently founded a consultancy, Finnovation Flows, where he provides solutions for clients using no-code / low-code tools. His contributions to the KNIME community include his recent AI extension, as well as an ongoing Youtube video series and Medium journal articles. Beyond that, he is a key solutions contributor on the KNIME forum, and recently became a KNIME Certified Trainer.

We’re happy to celebrate Paras Gupta as the COTM for October 2024! Paras is a long-time fixture as a KNIME Partner with his firm Day5 Analytics, and has contributed to webinars highlighting KNIME for Finance use cases, as well as hosting Data Connect events focused on Generative AI. You can also find some of his contributions on the KNIME Hub.

If you’re looking for help with spreadsheet automation using KNIME, this month’s COTM, Kazimierz Grabski, is someone you’ll want to talk to. Since starting with his first KNIME L1 certification a couple of years ago, he’s been a constant wellspring of tips and tricks during his learning journey, which you can find him posting on his LinkedIn and other socials. He’s also published on KNIME’s Low Code for Data Science Journal about how you can cleverly save time with KNIME.

When it comes to KNIME Ali Alkan, this month’s inductee, does a little bit of everything. You may already know about his advocacy for KNIME in Turkey due to his presence on social media. What you may not know is he helps organize key community events there, and is a regular contributor to Low Code for Data Science on Medium. In addition, he’s a KNIME Certified Trainer working through InforA, a KNIME Innovation Partner of the Year in 2023.

It might be easier to ask what Marcell Palfi hasn’t done for the KNIME Community lately. In his capacity as Head of Delivery, Data & Analytics at Datraction - a KNIME Partner - he recently presented a webinar highlighting transition from Alteryx to KNIME. He has also organized a KNIME meetup in Hungary with his company, and is a KNIME Certified Trainer to boot.

Mike Wiegand is a consultant and project manager who uses KNIME software extensively when creating solutions for clients. As a lead participant in the KNIME Community Hacking testing program, he has gone above and beyond in providing feedback, bug reports, and feature suggestions to improve KNIME software for everyone. This is in addition to his regular assistance providing solutions to the wider community via the KNIME forum.

Hans Samson is the KNIME Contributor of the Month for May 2024. When it comes to the community, Hans does a little bit of everything; he’s a contributing author for for the Low Code for Data Science journal on Medium, he presented some of his recent work at a KNIME webinar in March 2024, and he’s a long time presence on the KNIME forum with many solutions provided.

Dr. Frank Acito is professor emeritus at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, USA. He recently published a textbook, Predictive Analytics with KNIME, which covers several different analytics techniques  for citizen data scientists using the KNIME Analytics Platform as its primary tool.

Exhaustive, well organized, well written, and easy to follow, Predictive Analytics with KNIME is available from Springer, and many other online bookstores as well.

Takahiro Ohshima is a KNIME Certified Trainer and is also helping us translate the book KNIME Beginners' Luck into Japanese. Other than co-organizing Data Connect events in the past for our community in Japan, he has also helped to develop novel KNIME nodes like the MarvinJS nodes and the ‘JChem Extensions’, which empower researchers to work with chemical structure data. Check out these nodes on the KNIME Community Hub.

We are happy to announce Manuel Schwarze as the Contributor of the Month for February. Manuel is the man behind the RDKit Nodes Feature extension, the developer wrapping the RDKit functionalities in KNIME nodes and sharing them on the KNIME Community Hub. Did you know that Manuel even created a wizard tool, called the RDKit Nodes Creation Wizards Feature, specifically to assist KNIME node developers? Check it out!

We are starting this year by celebrating our newest Just KNIME It! Challenges KNinjas - Ryushi Seo, Naoyoshi Yamamoto, Bertold Balázs, Hiroki Yoshida, Luo Yuxi, Heather Lambert, Anil Kumar Sharma, Artem Ryasik, and Ángel Molina. The winners proposed solutions to all the 30 challenges we posted in our last season, and greatly contributed to our community with their knowledge sharing in the KNIME Forum. Their solutions were efficient, well-documented, and creative, inspiring us to continue working on didactic, data-centered challenges.

We are happy to announce Samuel Webb as the Contributor of the Month for Dec 2023. Sam was awarded the COTM of this month for being the man behind the development and maintenance of one of the most downloaded extensions of KNIME Analytics Platform: the Lhasa public plugin extension. A relatively small extension, with just 10 nodes, and yet very popular within the KNIME Community, it provides useful functionalities for model building and table manipulation, like performance scorer and table transformation nodes. By the way, Sam is also the author of the Slack Integration extension.

This month, we welcome Robin Richter as COTM for November 2023! Robin is the author of the “From SPSS Modeler to KNIME” Transition booklet published under the KNIME Press, mapping the most commonly used SPSS Modeler functions and techniques to their KNIME equivalent. But that’s not all – he is also a speaker at our events (check out the Data Connect: DACH Event from September) and recently became a KNIME Certified Trainer.

It is a no-brainer to have chosen Arief Rama Syarif as the KNIME COTM for October 2023. He is the first KNIME Certified Trainer in Indonesia, traveling across the country to teach people of all ages data science and rapidly growing the KNIME community in that area. Arief is also a successful social media influencer helping to create awareness of the importance of data literacy using KNIME amongst Indonesian-speaking users. Check out this website to learn more. Follow Arief on LinkedIn.

We're happy to announce Ángel Molina Laguna as KNIME COTM for September 2023! Ángel is one of the most enthusiastic voices in the KNIME community. His commitment to the weekly Just KNIME It challenges is regularly shared as valuable contributions on the KNIME Community Hub, and as social media posts with short educational videos and funny visuals. Recently, Ángel has also started a weekly newsletter to share with the Spanish-speaking community knowledge about data science, low code tools and visual programming. Follow Ángel on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We’re glad to announce Luo Yuxi as the COTM for August 2023! He was selected for his book, KNIME 视觉化数据分析 (KNIME Visual Data Analysis) which provides a comprehensive introduction to KNIME in Chinese. A Data Analyst and Software Developer, Luo is also an active KNIME forum participant.

We're happy to announce Artem Ryasik as KNIME COTM for July 2023! Artem is the prolific writer behind many excellent data stories that range from low code data anonymization to clustering techniques for analyzing knowledge graphs. His latest contributions shed light on conformal prediction, providing both theoretical insights and practical applications for classification and regression tasks. Recently, Artem also became a KNIME Certified Trainer, upskilling data professionals both inside and outside the organization. Read Artem’s Data Stories here.

This month, we welcome Arjen Peters as COTM for June 2023! Arjen has been a mainstay on the KNIME forum, and among all forum posters over the past year, he is a key leader for solutions proposed, likes received, and replies given. Whether he’s answering questions about data manipulation, troubleshooting models, or suggesting a few lines of RegEx, Arjen can always be found freely giving his time to make the KNIME forum a great resource for everyone.

We're happy to announce David Plummer as KNIME COTM for May 2023! David is the prolific writer behind many excellent data stories that masterfully blend KNIME with Python for enhanced data visualization themes or cluster analysis. The early adoption of KNIME modern UI in his data stories is further testimony to his commitment to always deliver content in step with the times. He also provides great support and feedback on the KNIME Forum.

This April, we are excited to announce James (김명석) Kim as our Contributor of the Month! James leads the partnership between KNIME and Zalesia, an Elite Partner in Korea. James has been a true ambassador for the Korean-speaking analytics community and serves on the board for KNIME Data Connect: Korea. He along with his team members has translated resources and has published Zalesia’s new book “Data Preprocessing and Integrated Analysis with KNIME" in Korean. You can find more material about KNIME in Korean on Zalesia’s YouTube channel and Blog.

Cristian Rastasanu is a data analyst at Mydral, the organization formerly nominated as the KNIME Partner of the Year 2022. Cristian has built five KNIME components for financial analysis, and published them on the KNIME Verified Component page in December 2022. The components offer data analysts popular functions in the finance industry: NPV, XNPV, IRR, XIRR, and MIRR.

Dominique is the first author of the paper “TeachOpenCADD-KNIME: A Teaching Platform for Computer-Aided Drug Design Using KNIME Workflows” published in 2019 by the American Chemical Society. The paper describes a KNIME workflow for different computer-aided drug design (CADD) tasks: a valuable resource for teaching students and life sciences low-coders. The workflow, publicly available on the KNIME Community Hub, is divided into eight components ready for execution on some example data. There is a different component for each topic, such as how to fetch, filter and analyze compound data.

Stephen has been a longstanding member of the KNIME Community for many years, and as the developer of the Vernalis KNIME Nodes Extension, he is the author of over 250 nodes used for cheminformatics, remote data searching, and general utility functions. Apart from that, he also serves on the board for KNIME Data Connect: UK, and has been a speaker at several different KNIME events going back to 2013.

This month, we celebrate the best of the best in the Just KNIME It! (JKI) Challenges. Winners were chosen based on the number of submitted solutions, as well as their creativity, efficiency, and educational value. Yasue Katsutaka, Emiliano Amendola, Raffaello Barri, Anil Kumar Sharma are all KNinjas who went above and beyond in making blogs and amazing dashboards, helping the community on the KNIME Forum, and being a big part of our social media events!

Although long overdue, we are happy to announce Daniel Weikert as the COTM for November. Daniel has stood out as a community contributor with his Udemy courses on KNIME, teaching more than 6,000 users everything from how to get started with KNIME to how to convert from Excel to KNIME. Daniel has most recently presented an excellent webinar on the same topic, Excel to KNIME.  He’s passed his teaching evaluation to become a KNIME Certified Trainer.

Talk about being an active KNIME community member! Kazutaka Watari aka @watarinko is a whirlwind: #66daysofdata Challenge ✔️L1 & L2 courses ✔️ L1 and L2 Certification Exams ✔️ Just KNIME It! Challenges ✔️ Sharing Solutions on the KNIME Hub ✔️ #100daysofdata Challenge ✔️ L4-ML course on Machine Learning algorithms ✔️Sharing Progress on Social Media ✔️

We're happy to announce Dayanjan Wijesinghe, also known as Shanaka, as COTM for September! Shanaka has done a lot of work to integrate KNIME into the Digital Healthcare field. This includes content collaborations with us on a variety of topics, such as hypothesis testing on FAERS data and total parenteral nutrition calculation, a joint talk for AAPS (the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists), and many other initiatives that are coming out soon – stay tuned!

We are happy to announce Dr. Arne Beckhaus, Head of Data Architecture Automotive at Continental, as the top community contributor for August for building Hash Files and Hash Strings components and leading the development of the Continental Nodes extension. Both components and nodes add unique functionalities to KNIME Hub: visit the Community Components – Summer 2022 Collection and Continental – Community – Example Space to learn more.

We're happy to announce John Emery as COTM for July! Not only is John the first certified trainer of KNIME Software (check out the new KNIME Certified Trainer badge) and a speaker at our events, but he is also the author of several blog posts about parsing and analyzing PDF documents, running baseball hitting streak simulations, or cracking Wordle.

Not only is Christophe an active member of the KNIME Forum and a speaker at our events, but has also co-authored several scientific papers on various QSAR topics where he has used KNIME, which you can read below.

• 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

Bruno Ng is a highly active member of the KNIME Forum and has also made many valuable contributions to the KNIME Hub in his public space. Bruno always engages other KNIMErs with the utmost courtesy and clarity. To date, he has created 1.9k posts, received 3.1k hearts, and provided 214 solutions. Thank you, Bruno!

An expert in marketing analytics and NLP, Francisco Ordenes has taught such topics using KNIME software at several  universities throughout his career.

Together with a team at KNIME, he developed a live repository for ML in marketing analytics on the KNIME Hub with reusable solutions for customer churn, sentiment analysis, automated image analysis, SEO & CX. An extensive analysis of this project is provided in his research paper.

Check out Paul Wisneskey's "Making the Pass" articles on American football! Paul explores whether he can teach his ML model to make a pass: throw the ball to a receiver in motion.  Part 1 deals with Parameter Optimization with KNIME and Part 2: Trains a Neural Network.

Nicky Dee's many video tutorials represent an extensive, organized, easy to digest, and useful resource for newbies and expert KNIME users to progress in their knowledge of KNIME, including exploration of lookup IDs, pivoting and unpivoting, aggregations, conditional math, date and time operations, excel function translations, and many more data transformation and ETL operations.

Malik has impacted DNA, mRNA, and miRNA analysis, gene ontology, and molecular biology with his research, as confirmed by a long list of publications in 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.

Andrea has had a multifaceted career. He’s been a business data analyst, data scientist, BI and data science manager at Vodafone and P&G, a university professor at various universities across Europe, a blogger, social media influencer, and book author. Throughout his career, and for all his professional activities, 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.

We are happy to announce Ashok K Harnal’s automated feature engineering components as the community contributions for November. These community components add unique functionalities to KNIME Hub, and provide good examples on how to bundle and share Python scripts without dependency issues. Visit the Community Component Highlights section on the Verified Component web page to learn more.

Congratulations Brian Bates - our Contributor of the Month for October - who is a trusted presence in our forum community. Despite registering on the KNIME forum only six months ago, he’s already accumulated more favorites and replies posted than almost anyone over the past 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 component: 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 out of emails or tweets.

Ignacio's work revolves around the Spanish-speaking KNIME community. He established and currently overviews the Spanish questions on the Forum, regularly hosts courses in Spanish, and he also translated the ebook "de Excel a KNIME Analytics Platform” into Spanish. Ignacio is a respected reference for our Spanish-speaking community members! Thanks Ignacio for your contributions!

Tosin is not only an active KNIME user, but she also shares valuable contributions on the KNIME Hub and knowledge through her posts on social media. Tosin also moderated the KNIME, Excel, & Reporting user group meeting at the recent KNIME Data Talks - Community Edition. Lastly, take a look at her Fraud Detection project (using KNIME of course!) on her LinkedIn page.

Makkynm is an active KNIME community member and has written numerous blog posts and guides in Japanese be it for beginner, intermediate, or advanced KNIME users.

Alzbeta Tuerkova and co-author Barbara Zdrazil, in their research paper show how KNIME is used for an efficient and reproducible drug-repurposing strategy to identify new drug candidates for rare diseases and COVID-19. The workflow, tutorials, and information gained on COVID-19 data are freely available to the scientific community for follow-up studies or can be tailored to specific needs of other use cases.

Giuseppe Di Fatta is Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Reading, where he also teaches data science courses using KNIME Analytics Platform: Data Science Algorithms & Tools, and Data Analytics and Mining. The current KNIME Certification Program was developed in collaboration with Giuseppe, too. As an ardent KNIME advocate, he’s also been sharing his positive experiences using KNIME software with the academic community.

Dennis has written several articles, where he shares his experiences, recipes, & best practices for analyzing data with KNIME Analytics Platform - both alone & in combination with other tools. A couple of his memorable articles include: making COVID-19 projections by combining KNIME, Jupyter, & Tableau (which also has a sequel), & his opinion piece on how &  why KNIME has become the most important tool in his daily work.

In his forum post, Phil shares what he’s doing with KNIME to spark his personal creativity - specifically for his hobby of role-playing games. Dive into the world of wizards, dwarves, elves, and humans working on heroic quests. Maybe you’ll be inspired to accept his challenge and share your own crazy KNIME projects!

Armin Ghassemi Rudd's Translator and Get Request Plus components can be found on the KNIME Hub and are also featured on our Verified Components webpage. Besides creating awesome components, Armin has been a long term and very active contributor to the KNIME Forum.

We had two contributors for the month of January: Evan Bristow and Miguel InfMad, who are long time KNIME users and data science experts. In recent years, Evan and Miguel have put their expertise to good use by building and nurturing a Facebook community for all KNIME users - from newbies to experts.

KNIME Hub Profile - Evan | KNIME Hub Profile - Miguel

Keith is an independent trainer and being an ardent KNIME advocate, has helped many get trained on KNIME through his courses on LinkedIn Learning: Introduction to Machine Learning with KNIME, and Data Science Foundations - Data Assessment for Predictive Modeling.

Angus is an active member of the KNIME community, and has written numerous blog articles about KNIME. In his TweetKollidR workflow article, he describes his KNIME workflow for creating text-rich visualizations of Twitter data.

SJ Porter’s GUID Generator and Text Preprocessing components were the community contributions in October, which at that time had the most number of downloads on the KNIME Hub.

Markus Lauber is a highly active member of the KNIME Forum and has also made many valuable contributions to the KNIME Hub in his public space. We'd like to especially point out his School of Duplicates article, which is just one of many! You can find it linked from the Knowledge Sharing category on our KNIME Forum.

Vijaykrishna Venkataraman was our first KNIME Community Contributor! This is his mind map of KNIME features, which he talks about in his LinkedIn post. In his words, "these are just my picks and don’t cover the entire list."