About the authors

Sudharsan Ravichandiran is a data scientist, researcher, artificial intelligence enthusiast, and YouTuber (search for Sudharsan reinforcement learning). He completed his bachelors in information technology at Anna University. His area of research focuses on practical implementations of deep learning and reinforcement learning, which includes natural language processing and computer vision. He used to be a freelance web developer and designer and has designed award-winning websites. He is an open source contributor and loves answering questions on Stack Overflow.

 

Sean Saito is the youngest ever Machine Learning Developer at SAP and the first bachelor hired for the position. He currently researches and develops machine learning algorithms that automate financial processes. He graduated from Yale-NUS College in 2017 with a Bachelor of Science degree (with Honours), where he explored unsupervised feature extraction for his thesis. Having a profound interest in hackathons, Sean represented Singapore during Data Science Game 2016, the largest student data science competition. Before attending university in Singapore, Sean grew up in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Boston.

Writing this book is a daunting task for any 23-year-old, and hence I would like to thank many people who made this possible. My greatest words of gratitude belong to my mother and brother for giving me as much love, understanding, and guidance as anyone can fathom. Many thanks also goes to my closest friends and mentors, all from whom I've acquired much knowledge and wisdom, for their encouragement and advice.

Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani is currently working as an Engineering Manager for a Deep learning team at Kairos. Previously, he worked as a Senior Machine Learning Developer at SAP, Singapore and worked at various startups in developing machine learning products. He has a Masters from Indian Institute of Technology—Madras. He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences and submitted applications for several patents in the area of machine learning. In his spare time, he coaches programming and machine learning to school students and engineers.

I thank my spouse Ezhil, mom, dad, family and friends for their immense support. I thank all the teachers, colleagues and mentors from whom I have learned a lot. I thank the co-authors Wen and Sean making their contributions a pleasure to read. I thank the publishing team from Packt especially Snehal for encouraging at difficult times.

 

Yang Wenzhuo works as a Data Scientist at SAP, Singapore. He got a bachelor's degree in computer science from Zhejiang University in 2011 and a Ph.D. in machine learning from the National University of Singapore in 2016. His research focuses on optimization in machine learning and deep reinforcement learning. He has published papers on top machine learning/computer vision conferences including ICML and CVPR, and operations research journals including Mathematical Programming.