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