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John Murray is a veteran data scientist who built his first predictive data model, using Fortran, in September 1976. In 1989 he co-founded, and became technical director of, consumer survey group NDL International which is now part of Acxiom. In that role he applied columnar analytical techniques to large questionnaire databases and pioneered the application of machine learning to survey analysis.

He released an object oriented neural network framework, written in C++, as open source in 1993. (GitHub link to 1993 software: https://github.com/MurrayData/ObjectNet)

Since then John has acted as a data science advisor to startups, corporates and governments globally through his own company, Fusion Data Science Ltd. In 2012 he became a part time academic, and was appointed Visiting Professor in the Data Science Lab at University of Liverpool in July 2020.

His current research work specialises in the analysis of large geospatial datasets, including satellite data.

He was recently presented with a special award for “Outstanding Contribution to Geospatial Technology in Romania” for the development of RomGEO, an open source library for geospatial processing in Romania with support for parallel CPU and GPU acceleration.