Preface

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have placed great power into the hands of humans. With great power comes a proportional level of responsibility. Self-driving cars, chatbots, and increasingly accurate predictions of the future are but a few examples of AI’s ability to supercharge humankind’s capacity for growth and advancement.

AI is becoming a core, transformative path that is changing the way we think about every aspect of our lives. It is impacting industry. It is becoming pervasive and embedded in our everyday lives. Most excitingly, this is a field that is still in its infancy: the AI revolution has only just begun.

As we collect more and more data and tackle that data with better and faster algorithms, we can use AI to build increasingly accurate models and to answer increasingly complex, previously intractable questions.

From this, it will come as no surprise that the ability to work with and fully utilize AI will be a skill that is set only to increase in value. In this book, we explore various real-world scenarios and learn how to apply relevant AI algorithms to a wide swath of problems.

The book starts with the most basic AI concepts and progressively builds on these concepts to solve increasingly difficult problems. It will use the initial knowledge gleaned during the beginning chapters as a foundation to allow the reader to explore and tackle some of the more complicated problems in AI. By the end of the book, the reader will have gained a solid understanding of many AI techniques and will have gained confidence about when to use these techniques.

We will start by talking about various realms of AI. We’ll then move on to discuss more complex algorithms, such as extremely random forests, Hidden Markov Models, genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and so on.

This book is for Python programmers looking to use AI algorithms to create real-world applications. This book is friendly to Python beginners, but familiarity with Python programming would certainly be helpful so you can play around with the code. It is also useful to experienced Python programmers who are looking to implement artificial intelligence techniques.

You will learn how to make informed decisions about the type of algorithms you need to use and how to implement those algorithms to get the best possible results. If you want to build versatile applications that can make sense of images, text, speech, or some other form of data, this book on artificial intelligence will definitely come to your rescue!