Celebrating 15 data science community giants with CAKE

The giants of the open-source data science community are busy people. They share knowledge, develop new functionality and resources, and offer mentorship. Their community contributions provide the broad shoulders for us all to stand on to see further on our data science journey.

But on Friday the 13th (of October), they were at CAKE: The Community Awards for KNIME Excellence Day 2023. The CAKE award recognizes the top contributors to the KNIME community and celebrates 15* KNIME Contributors of the Month (COTM) from 2022/2023, who were invited to a full day of celebrations online and onsite at the KNIME Konstanz office.

*Keep reading to find out why 😉

COTMs are KNIME users who have been nominated for contributing to a better learning experience as educators, providing faster and more detailed answers to community questions, developing richer, more diverse functionality, or increasing awareness in the data science community for KNIME as an open source, low code data science tool on social media.

The CAKE 2023 awards celebrated the 15 giants. The awardees went on an onsite tour of the KNIME office in Konstanz, dropping by to chat with some of KNIME’s development team and Michael Berthold, our CEO, before attending the award ceremony and panel discussion which were streamed live.

“I would like to thank all COTMs in the name of the KNIME community for the incredible work they have been doing in education, research, development, and support. They actively inspire others to explore the data science space and promote a culture of continuous learning,” said Rosaria Silipo, VP of Evangelism at KNIME.

Each awardee and their top contributions are highlighted in the Best of KNIME - Season 3 ebook. Meet them here:

• Dayanjan Wijesinghe is awarded for his work in training healthcare professionals for a data-driven future and developing digital healthcare solutions for the community. Check out his calculator for automating total parenteral nutrition calculation.
• Kazutaka Watari has been inspiring learners by sharing his own learning process on social media when he took the #66daysofdata with KNIME challenge and then upped the stakes with #100daysofdata.
• Daniel Weikert: If you’re a spreadsheet user and thinking of dipping your toes into data science, join the other 6,000 people who have taken one of his many courses. Try his “The why and how to get started” video for a taster.
• Katsutaka Yasue, Emiliano Amendola, Rafello Barri, Anil Kumar Sharma are why we have not just 12 COTMs receiving CAKE awards, but 15! They were all named COTMs for December 2022 for being the best of the best in solving and sharing their solutions to Just KNIME It! Challenges. Read more in Best of KNIME - Season 3.
• Stephen Roughley is the developer of over 250 nodes that provide additional cheminformatics capabilities for the community. Watch Stephen discussing Driving Life Science Innovation with Open Source Developments.
• Dominque Sydow is a cheminformatics research scientist and the first author of a valuable teaching resource: A teaching platform for computer-aided drug design, with different components to e.g., fetch, filter, and analyze compound data.
• Cristian Rastasanu developed 6 calculators for financial analysts to automate getting Net Present Value, Extended Net Present Value, Internal Rate of Return, Extended Internal Rate of Return, and Modified Internal Rate of Return. Find them and more in the Financial Analysis collection.
• James Kim is a true ambassador for the Korean-speaking analytics community. He’s translated many learning resources into Korean, has his own blog and YouTube channel, and recently published the first book about data analytics with KNIME in Korean. Read more in the  Best of KNIME - Season 3.
• David Plummer: If you need tips & tricks on blending KNIME & Python for advanced Python visualization or cluster analysis, David – or DiaAzul as he’s known on the KNIME Forum – provides masterful advice.
• Arjen Peters is highlighted as a true support KNinja in the community, troubleshooting your REST API issues, suggesting a few lines of RegEx, or answering your data manipulation questions. Find him on KNIME Forum here.
• Artem Ryasik helps data experts with both theory and hands-on examples. In the Best of KNIME ebook he walks through a workflow for conformal prediction for classification.
• Luo Yuxi wrote the first introductory book to KNIME in Chinese, KNIME 视觉化数据分析 (KNIME Visual Data Analysis), which provides a comprehensive introduction. Luo is also an active member of the KNIME Forum, providing support.

During the afternoon of the CAKE awards, Roberto Cardili, Data Scientist at KNIME, interviewed two COTMs, Rafaello Barri and Arjen Peters to find out more about their data science community work.

Arjen Peters, who’s an aircraft data consultant and support engineer at Exsyn Aviation Solutions, in Amsterdam (Netherlands), has helped the community by uploading over 200 solutions to the KNIME Forum, covering topics such as how to do regular expressions, connect to REST APIs, build data apps, and more. Rafaello Barri, a data science consultant at BIP, Milan (Italy), is a very active contributor to the KNIME Forum. His speciality is answering people’s questions all around ETL.

Watch the interview to find out their thoughts on the new LLMs, how they discovered KNIME in the first place, and their tips for using their favorite functionality in KNIME.

Meet the COTMs who are contributing actively to the KNIME community by sharing knowledge and expertise, developing new functionality, and increasing awareness for low-code data science at the CAKE 2023 award ceremony.

Find out more about what a COTM is and how to become one from Rosaria Silipo, Head of Evangelism at KNIME. In the video, hear also how you can nominate someone to be COTM, and learn about what COTMs receive from KNIME to recognize their work.

If, while watching the video, the name of someone springs to mind who has inspired or helped you in your data science work, nominate them for the COTM award program in this proposal form.