Learning SPARQL


Bob DuCharme - 2011
    With this concise book, you will learn how to use the latest version of this W3C standard to retrieve and manipulate the increasing amount of public and private data available via SPARQL endpoints. Several open source and commercial tools already support SPARQL, and this introduction gets you started right away.Begin with how to write and run simple SPARQL 1.1 queries, then dive into the language's powerful features and capabilities for manipulating the data you retrieve. Learn what you need to know to add to, update, and delete data in RDF datasets, and give web applications access to this data.Understand SPARQL’s connection with RDF, the semantic web, and related specificationsQuery and combine data from local and remote sourcesCopy, convert, and create new RDF dataLearn how datatype metadata, standardized functions, and extension functions contribute to your queriesIncorporate SPARQL queries into web-based applications

Cognitive Neuroscience: A Very Short Introduction


Richard Passingham - 2016
    This began to change with the devising of methods to try to tap into what was going on in the 'black box' of the mind, and the development of 'cognitive psychology'. With the study of patients who had suffered brain damage or injury to limited parts of the brain, outlines of brain components and processes began to take shape, and by the end of the 1970s, a new science, cognitive neuroscience, was born. But it was with the development of ways of accessing activation of the working brain using imaging techniques such as PET and fMRI that cognitive neuroscience came into its own, as a science cutting across psychology and neuroscience, with strong connections to philosophy of mind. Experiments involving subjects in scanners while doing various tasks, thinking, problem solving, and remembering are shedding light on the brain processes involved. The research is exciting and new, and often makes media headlines. But there is much misunderstanding about what brain imaging tells us, and the interpretation of studies on cognition.In this Very Short Introduction Richard Passingham, a distinguished cognitive neuroscientist, gives a provocative and exciting account of the nature and scope of this relatively new field, and the techniques available to us, focusing on investigation of the human brain. He explains what brain imaging shows, pointing out common misconceptions, and gives a brief overview of the different aspects of human cognition: perceiving, attending, remembering, reasoning, deciding, and acting. Passingham concludes with a discussion of the exciting advances that may lie ahead.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The AI Delusion


Gary Smith - 2018
    The Computer Revolution may be even more life-changing than the Industrial Revolution. We can do things with computers that could never be done before, and computers can do things for us that could never be done before.But our love of computers should not cloud our thinking about their limitations.We are told that computers are smarter than humans and that data mining can identify previously unknown truths, or make discoveries that will revolutionize our lives. Our lives may well be changed, but not necessarily for the better. Computers are very good at discovering patterns, but are uselessin judging whether the unearthed patterns are sensible because computers do not think the way humans think.We fear that super-intelligent machines will decide to protect themselves by enslaving or eliminating humans. But the real danger is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than us and, so, trust computers to make important decisions for us.The AI Delusion explains why we should not be intimidated into thinking that computers are infallible, that data-mining is knowledge discovery, and that black boxes should be trusted.

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow


Aurélien Géron - 2017
    Now that machine learning is thriving, even programmers who know close to nothing about this technology can use simple, efficient tools to implement programs capable of learning from data. This practical book shows you how.By using concrete examples, minimal theory, and two production-ready Python frameworks—Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow—author Aurélien Géron helps you gain an intuitive understanding of the concepts and tools for building intelligent systems. You’ll learn how to use a range of techniques, starting with simple Linear Regression and progressing to Deep Neural Networks. If you have some programming experience and you’re ready to code a machine learning project, this guide is for you.This hands-on book shows you how to use:Scikit-Learn, an accessible framework that implements many algorithms efficiently and serves as a great machine learning entry pointTensorFlow, a more complex library for distributed numerical computation, ideal for training and running very large neural networksPractical code examples that you can apply without learning excessive machine learning theory or algorithm details

Build a Career in Data Science


Emily Robinson - 2020
    Industry experts Jacqueline Nolis and Emily Robinson lay out the soft skills you’ll need alongside your technical know-how in order to succeed in the field. Following their clear and simple instructions you’ll craft a resume that hiring managers will love, learn how to ace your interview, and ensure you hit the ground running in your first months at your new job. Once you’ve gotten your foot in the door, learn to thrive as a data scientist by handling high expectations, dealing with stakeholders, and managing failures. Finally, you’ll look towards the future and learn about how to join the broader data science community, leaving a job gracefully, and plotting your career path. With this book by your side you’ll have everything you need to ensure a rewarding and productive role in data science.

The Deep Learning Revolution


Terrence J. Sejnowski - 2018
    Deep learning networks can play poker better than professional poker players and defeat a world champion at Go. In this book, Terry Sejnowski explains how deep learning went from being an arcane academic field to a disruptive technology in the information economy.Sejnowski played an important role in the founding of deep learning, as one of a small group of researchers in the 1980s who challenged the prevailing logic-and-symbol based version of AI. The new version of AI Sejnowski and others developed, which became deep learning, is fueled instead by data. Deep networks learn from data in the same way that babies experience the world, starting with fresh eyes and gradually acquiring the skills needed to navigate novel environments. Learning algorithms extract information from raw data; information can be used to create knowledge; knowledge underlies understanding; understanding leads to wisdom. Someday a driverless car will know the road better than you do and drive with more skill; a deep learning network will diagnose your illness; a personal cognitive assistant will augment your puny human brain. It took nature many millions of years to evolve human intelligence; AI is on a trajectory measured in decades. Sejnowski prepares us for a deep learning future.

Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness


Daniel C. Dennett - 1996
    Beginning with the macromolecules of DNA and RNA, the author shows how, step-by-step, animal life moved from the simple ability to respond to frequently recurring environmental conditions to much more powerful ways of beating the odds, ways of using patterns of past experience to predict the future in never-before-encountered situations. Whether talking about robots whose video-camera ”eyes” give us the powerful illusion that ”there is somebody in there” or asking us to consider whether spiders are just tiny robots mindlessly spinning their webs of elegant design, Dennett is a master at finding and posing questions sure to stimulate and even disturb.

Python Machine Learning


Sebastian Raschka - 2015
    We are living in an age where data comes in abundance, and thanks to the self-learning algorithms from the field of machine learning, we can turn this data into knowledge. Automated speech recognition on our smart phones, web search engines, e-mail spam filters, the recommendation systems of our favorite movie streaming services – machine learning makes it all possible.Thanks to the many powerful open-source libraries that have been developed in recent years, machine learning is now right at our fingertips. Python provides the perfect environment to build machine learning systems productively.This book will teach you the fundamentals of machine learning and how to utilize these in real-world applications using Python. Step-by-step, you will expand your skill set with the best practices for transforming raw data into useful information, developing learning algorithms efficiently, and evaluating results.You will discover the different problem categories that machine learning can solve and explore how to classify objects, predict continuous outcomes with regression analysis, and find hidden structures in data via clustering. You will build your own machine learning system for sentiment analysis and finally, learn how to embed your model into a web app to share with the world

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World


Cade Metz - 2021
    Through the lives of Geoff Hinton and other major players, Metz explains this transformative technology and makes the quest thrilling.--Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker Recipient of starred reviews in both Kirkus and Library JournalTHE UNTOLD TECH STORY OF OUR TIMEWhat does it mean to be smart? To be human? What do we really want from life and the intelligence we have, or might create?With deep and exclusive reporting, across hundreds of interviews, New York Times Silicon Valley journalist Cade Metz brings you into the rooms where these questions are being answered. Where an extraordinarily powerful new artificial intelligence has been built into our biggest companies, our social discourse, and our daily lives, with few of us even noticing.Long dismissed as a technology of the distant future, artificial intelligence was a project consigned to the fringes of the scientific community. Then two researchers changed everything. One was a sixty-four-year-old computer science professor who didn't drive and didn't fly because he could no longer sit down--but still made his way across North America for the moment that would define a new age of technology. The other was a thirty-six-year-old neuroscientist and chess prodigy who laid claim to being the greatest game player of all time before vowing to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.They took two very different paths to that lofty goal, and they disagreed on how quickly it would arrive. But both were soon drawn into the heart of the tech industry. Their ideas drove a new kind of arms race, spanning Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and OpenAI, a new lab founded by Silicon Valley kingpin Elon Musk. But some believed that China would beat them all to the finish line.Genius Makers dramatically presents the fierce conflict between national interests, shareholder value, the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the very human concerns about privacy, security, bias, and prejudice. Like a great Victorian novel, this world of eccentric, brilliant, often unimaginably yet suddenly wealthy characters draws you into the most profound moral questions we can ask. And like a great mystery, it presents the story and facts that lead to a core, vital question:How far will we let it go?

The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction


Trevor Hastie - 2001
    With it has come vast amounts of data in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, finance, and marketing. The challenge of understanding these data has led to the development of new tools in the field of statistics, and spawned new areas such as data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Many of these tools have common underpinnings but are often expressed with different terminology. This book describes the important ideas in these areas in a common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis is on concepts rather than mathematics. Many examples are given, with a liberal use of color graphics. It should be a valuable resource for statisticians and anyone interested in data mining in science or industry. The book's coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning. The many topics include neural networks, support vector machines, classification trees and boosting—the first comprehensive treatment of this topic in any book. Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman are professors of statistics at Stanford University. They are prominent researchers in this area: Hastie and Tibshirani developed generalized additive models and wrote a popular book of that title. Hastie wrote much of the statistical modeling software in S-PLUS and invented principal curves and surfaces. Tibshirani proposed the Lasso and is co-author of the very successful An Introduction to the Bootstrap. Friedman is the co-inventor of many data-mining tools including CART, MARS, and projection pursuit.

The Human Face of Big Data


Rick Smolan - 2012
    Its enable us to sense, measure, and understand aspects of our existence in ways never before possible. The Human Face of Big Data captures, in glorious photographs and moving essays, an extraordinary revolution sweeping, almost invisibly, through business, academia, government, healthcare, and everyday life. It's already enabling us to provide a healthier life for our children. To provide our seniors with independence while keeping them safe. To help us conserve precious resources like water and energy. To alert us to tiny changes in our health, weeks or years before we develop a life-threatening illness. To peer into our own individual genetic makeup. To create new forms of life.  And soon, as many predict, to re-engineer our own species. And we've barely scratched the surface . . . Over the past decade, Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, co-founders of Against All Odds Productions, have produced a series of ambitious global projects in collaboration with hundreds of the world's leading photographers, writers, and graphic designers. Their Day in the Life projects were credited for creating a mass market for large-format illustrated books (rare was the coffee table book without one).  Today their projects aim at sparking global conversations about emerging topics ranging from the Internet (24 Hours in Cyberspace), to Microprocessors (One Digital Day), to how the human race is learning to heal itself, (The Power to Heal) to the global water crisis (Blue Planet Run). This year Smolan and Erwitt dispatched photographers and writers in every corner of the globe to explore the world of “Big Data” and to determine if it truly does, as many in the field claim, represent a brand new toolset for humanity, helping address the biggest challenges facing our species. The book features 10 essays by noted writers:Introduction: OCEANS OF DATA by Dan GardnerChapter 1: REFLECTIONS IN A DIGITAL MIRROR by Juan Enriquez, CEO, BiotechnomomyChapter 2: OUR DATA OURSELVES by Kate Green, the EconomistChapter 3: QUANTIFYING MYSELF by AJ Jacobs, EsquireChapter 4: DARK DATA by Marc Goodman, Future Crime InstituteChapter 5:  THE SENTIENT SENSOR MESH by Susan Karlin, Fast CompanyChapter 6: TAKING THE PULSE OF THE PLANET by Esther Dyson, EDventureChapter 7: CITIZEN SCIENCE by Gareth Cook, the Boston GlobeChapter 8: A DEMOGRAPH OF ONE by Michael Malone, Forbes magazineChapter 9: THE ART OF DATA by Aaron Koblin, Google Artist in ResidenceChapter 10: DATA DRIVEN by Jonathan Harris, Cowbird The book will also feature stunning info graphics from NIGEL HOLMES.1) GOOGLING GOOGLE: all the ways Google uses Data to help humanity2) DATA IS THE NEW OIL3) THE WORLD ACCORDING TO TWITTER4) AUCTIONING EYEBALLS: The world of Internet advertising5) FACEBOOK: A Billion Friends

Think Stats


Allen B. Downey - 2011
    This concise introduction shows you how to perform statistical analysis computationally, rather than mathematically, with programs written in Python.You'll work with a case study throughout the book to help you learn the entire data analysis process—from collecting data and generating statistics to identifying patterns and testing hypotheses. Along the way, you'll become familiar with distributions, the rules of probability, visualization, and many other tools and concepts.Develop your understanding of probability and statistics by writing and testing codeRun experiments to test statistical behavior, such as generating samples from several distributionsUse simulations to understand concepts that are hard to grasp mathematicallyLearn topics not usually covered in an introductory course, such as Bayesian estimationImport data from almost any source using Python, rather than be limited to data that has been cleaned and formatted for statistics toolsUse statistical inference to answer questions about real-world data

Deep Learning


Ian Goodfellow - 2016
    Because the computer gathers knowledge from experience, there is no need for a human computer operator to formally specify all the knowledge that the computer needs. The hierarchy of concepts allows the computer to learn complicated concepts by building them out of simpler ones; a graph of these hierarchies would be many layers deep. This book introduces a broad range of topics in deep learning.The text offers mathematical and conceptual background, covering relevant concepts in linear algebra, probability theory and information theory, numerical computation, and machine learning. It describes deep learning techniques used by practitioners in industry, including deep feedforward networks, regularization, optimization algorithms, convolutional networks, sequence modeling, and practical methodology; and it surveys such applications as natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, online recommendation systems, bioinformatics, and videogames. Finally, the book offers research perspectives, covering such theoretical topics as linear factor models, autoencoders, representation learning, structured probabilistic models, Monte Carlo methods, the partition function, approximate inference, and deep generative models.Deep Learning can be used by undergraduate or graduate students planning careers in either industry or research, and by software engineers who want to begin using deep learning in their products or platforms. A website offers supplementary material for both readers and instructors.

Machine Learning


Ethem Alpaydin - 2016
    It is the basis for a new approach to artificial intelligence that aims to program computers to use example data or past experience to solve a given problem. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Ethem Alpayd�n offers a concise and accessible overview of the new AI. This expanded edition offers new material on such challenges facing machine learning as privacy, security, accountability, and bias. Alpayd�n, author of a popular textbook on machine learning, explains that as Big Data has gotten bigger, the theory of machine learning--the foundation of efforts to process that data into knowledge--has also advanced. He describes the evolution of the field, explains important learning algorithms, and presents example applications. He discusses the use of machine learning algorithms for pattern recognition; artificial neural networks inspired by the human brain; algorithms that learn associations between instances; and reinforcement learning, when an autonomous agent learns to take actions to maximize reward. In a new chapter, he considers transparency, explainability, and fairness, and the ethical and legal implications of making decisions based on data.

Hands-On Programming with R: Write Your Own Functions and Simulations


Garrett Grolemund - 2014
    With this book, you'll learn how to load data, assemble and disassemble data objects, navigate R's environment system, write your own functions, and use all of R's programming tools.RStudio Master Instructor Garrett Grolemund not only teaches you how to program, but also shows you how to get more from R than just visualizing and modeling data. You'll gain valuable programming skills and support your work as a data scientist at the same time.Work hands-on with three practical data analysis projects based on casino gamesStore, retrieve, and change data values in your computer's memoryWrite programs and simulations that outperform those written by typical R usersUse R programming tools such as if else statements, for loops, and S3 classesLearn how to write lightning-fast vectorized R codeTake advantage of R's package system and debugging toolsPractice and apply R programming concepts as you learn them