Naik Swapnali Joshi - Think AI

I couldnt have accomplished this without the blessings and love of my grandmother Smt. Suman Muley and my beloved parents.

My mother Pratibha Joshi, for being my constant source of inspiration and energy. And to my father, Shri Vasant Joshi for always believing in me.

Swapnali Joshi Naik is currently working as Scientist D/Joint Director at one of the Scientific and Technical organisation which is under Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India. She joined as Scientist B and held different technical appointments in various Government organizations under MeitY across India. She is having more than 15 years of experience in training, mentoring, software development and handling various Govt. funded Capacity Building projects in Information, Electronics and Communication Technology (IECT) area. She has completed B.E (CSE) and Masters in Computer Science and Engineering. She has carried out research work in Big Data & Cloud Computing and her area of interests includes machine learning, Database technologies and algorithms. Her greater goal is to create skilled professionals across the nation by mentoring and disseminating knowledge through various Capacity Building Programmes in the field of IECT.

Prof Vinita Jindal is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Keshav Mahavidyalaya, the University of Delhi having more than 22 years of experience. She did her Doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Delhi. She is mainly working in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Networks. Her areas of interest include Network Protocols, Cybersecurity, Intrusion Detection Systems, Dark Web, Deep Learning, Recommender Systems and Vehicular Adhoc Networks to name a few.

With the deepest gratitude, I wish to thank almighty for giving me the strength to pursue my dreams. This could have never been achieved without the faith I have in you, God.

I am indebted to my courageous parents and my sisters Vaishali & Supriya for always motivating me and being incredibly supportive throughout my life. I thank my son Shivam, without whom I would not have even thought of writing this book. He is a precious jewel of my life and his unfailing emotional support and continuous encouragement propelled me forward during the entire journey of creation of this book.

I am grateful to my organization and my colleagues for providing me new opportunities at work place, which enabled me to hone my technical skills and triggered my interest to share my knowledge through this book.

I would like to express my gratitude to the entire BPB Publications team for helping me in putting this book together. Their continuous assistance and guidance helped me to bring this book in the present form. I would also thank Dr. Vinita Jindal, Technical Reviewer of this book for her valuables suggestions.

Finally, I am thankful to all my precious friends and every person who have come in my life and inspired me through their presence.

There is a huge increase in generation of data with each day through various sources such as sensors, internet, communications, computing, social networking etc. By leveraging this massive amount of data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing a major role in finding out the hidden patterns in data. The ability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to integrate information and data analysis results in generation of useful insights which in turn helps us to improve business decisions and solve complex real-world problems. AI algorithms help us to tackle this voluminous data and build the accurate models to provide the solution.

AI is becoming a wide-range and fastest growing technology which is transforming every aspect of our life. It is making its impact in every sector such as healthcare, automobiles, finance, social platforms & so on and affecting our daily lives, may it be online shopping, watching a movie or self driving cars. With every industry adopting AI technology in its domain, learning and upgrading in AI related skills, definitely opens up world of opportunities for you.

Having worked in various capacities in Government organizations, my job role involved execution of capacity building programmes in IT area across nation in order to generate skilled manpower and enhance employment opportunities. While conducting training programmes in AI field, I realized that the availability of an organized and comprehensive study material for beginners would help them to have better understanding of the subject and equip them with the right information for taking up career in AI. This thought gave me a motivation to write this book.

Moreover, AI is a vast field and has various sub-domains. In order to further narrow down and gain the expertise in one of these domains, it is pertinent to have the introductory and basic knowledge of all AI related concepts and fields. Hence, the intention of writing this is to provide the overview of various AI related fields such as Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing etc. in a single book so that one can choose his/her field interest and dive deep into any of sub domain by exploring it more.