Contributors

About the author

Hadelin de Ponteves is the co-founder and director of technology at BlueLife AI, which leverages the power of cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence to empower businesses to make massive profits by optimizing processes, maximizing efficiency, and increasing profitability. Hadelin is also an online entrepreneur who has created 50+ top-rated educational e-courses on topics such as machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, which have reached over 700,000 subscribers in 204 countries.

First and foremost, I would like to thank Jan Warchocki for his amazing contribution to the book. Jan is one of my top talented students on Udemy, and I had the pleasure to work with him on the creation of this book. He provided very smart feedback on every chapter, added many brilliant examples to illustrate the theory and practice for each of the AI models, and even brought his own practical application in the last chapter, covering the most advanced AI model of this book. Thanks to Jan, the book is richer in relevant AI applications, and more complete in the theory. I give him my highest thanks, and I have no doubt he will become a very talented AI scientist with whom I will have the pleasure to collaborate again on other projects.

Then I would like to thank my business partner and dear friend Kirill Eremenko, who encouraged me to write this book. First, Kirill gave me the inspiration to write a complete book on AI. But most importantly, this book would never have been written without him. Indeed, I was able to create this book thanks to the many years of collaboration I had with Kirill producing our online courses.

This book includes the top explanations and practical activities of our courses, while seriously taking into account all of the most recurrent feedback we collected from our students over the years.

I would also like to thank Alex Patterson, Jonathan Malysiak, and David Barnes from the team at Packt. Alex did a tremendous job improving the book, by reviewing and providing feedback on every single paragraph, making sure everything is top quality from start to finish. Jonathan was like a coach to me, helping me all the way to make this book better and better. Sometimes some big challenges had to be taken on during the creation of this book, and Jon was here to encourage me every time to succeed in them. I am very grateful to him for pushing me to write this book and achieve my highest potential. David was the one to offer me this opportunity in the first place. He came to me with a great idea, convincing me that it was possible to convey the energy I have in my online courses into a book. I accepted the challenge, and today I can say that he was right. Thanks, David, for this brilliant idea.

And finally, I would like to thank the technical reviewers of this book, who not only provided feedback on every chapter of the book, but also made sure that all the code ran correctly. Thanks to them the reader is better guided in the theory of the AI models, and also on how to run all the different code in this book.