Willi Richert - Building Machine Learning Systems with Python

Willi Richert has a PhD in Machine Learning and Robotics, and he currently works for Microsoft in the Core Relevance Team of Bing, where he is involved in a variety of machine learning areas such as active learning and statistical machine translation.

This book would not have been possible without the support of my wife Natalie and my sons Linus and Moritz. I am also especially grateful for the many fruitful discussions with my current and previous managers, Andreas Bode, Clemens Marschner, Hongyan Zhou, and Eric Crestan, as well as my colleagues and friends, Tomasz Marciniak, Cristian Eigel, Oliver Niehoerster, and Philipp Adelt. The interesting ideas are most likely from them; the bugs belong to me.

Luis Pedro Coelho is a Computational Biologist: someone who uses computers as a tool to understand biological systems. Within this large field, Luis works in Bioimage Informatics, which is the application of machine learning techniques to the analysis of images of biological specimens. His main focus is on the processing of large scale image data. With robotic microscopes, it is possible to acquire hundreds of thousands of images in a day, and visual inspection of all the images becomes impossible.

Luis has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, which is one of the leading universities in the world in the area of machine learning. He is also the author of several scientific publications.

Luis started developing open source software in 1998 as a way to apply to real code what he was learning in his computer science courses at the Technical University of Lisbon. In 2004, he started developing in Python and has contributed to several open source libraries in this language. He is the lead developer on mahotas, the popular computer vision package for Python, and is the contributor of several machine learning codes.

I thank my wife Rita for all her love and support, and I thank my daughter Anna for being the best thing ever.

Matthieu Brucher holds an Engineering degree from the Ecole Superieure d'Electricite (Information, Signals, Measures), France, and has a PhD in Unsupervised Manifold Learning from the Universite de Strasbourg, France. He currently holds an HPC Software Developer position in an oil company and works on next generation reservoir simulation.

Mike Driscoll has been programming in Python since Spring 2006. He enjoys writing about Python on his blog at http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/. Mike also occasionally writes for the Python Software Foundation, i-Programmer, and Developer Zone. He enjoys photography and reading a good book. Mike has also been a technical reviewer for the following Packt Publishing books: Python 3 Object Oriented Programming , Python 2.6 Graphics Cookbook , and Python Web Development Beginner's Guide .

I would like to thank my wife, Evangeline, for always supporting me. I would also like to thank my friends and family for all that they do to help me. And I would like to thank Jesus Christ for saving me.

Maurice HT Ling completed his PhD. in Bioinformatics and BSc (Hons) in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Melbourne. He is currently a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and an honorary fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He co-edits the Python papers and has co-founded the Python User Group (Singapore), where he has served as vice president since 2010. His research interests lie in lifebiological life, artificial life, and artificial intelligenceusing computer science and statistics as tools to understand life and its numerous aspects. You can find his website at: http://maurice.vodien.com

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Preface

You could argue that it is a fortunate coincidence that you are holding this book in your hands (or your e-book reader). After all, there are millions of books printed every year, which are read by millions of readers; and then there is this book read by you. You could also argue that a couple of machine learning algorithms played their role in leading you to this book (or this book to you). And we, the authors, are happy that you want to understand more about the how and why.