The machine learning/statistics crowd. Some names - Judea Pearl, Tom Mitchell, Pete Norvig, Andrew Ng, Geoff Hinton, John Langford, Jeff Dean. Of course there's many more than that, but these have gained some fame through textbooks/open sources/popular press etc. More generally the approaches taken by Google, like vector space models that power search engines. If Google's doing it it's likely not wacko because they have a low tolerance for tomfoolery down there.