About the Authors

Antonio Gulli is a transformational software executive and business leader with a passion for establishing and managing global technological talent for innovation and execution. He is an expert in search engines, online services, machine learning, information retrieval, analytics, and cloud computing. So far, he has been lucky enough to gain professional experience in four different countries in Europe and manage teams in six different countries in Europe and America. Currently, he works as site lead and director of cloud in Google Warsaw, driving European efforts for Serverless, Kubernetes, and Google Cloud UX. Previously, Antonio helped to innovate academic search as the vice president for Elsevier, a worldwide leading publisher. Before that, he drove query suggestions and news search as a principal engineer for Microsoft. Earlier, he served as the CTO for Ask.com, driving multimedia and news search. Antonio has filed for 20+ patents, published multiple academic papers, and served as a senior PC member in multiple international conferences. He truly believes that to be successful, you must have a great combination of management, research skills, just-get-it-done, and selling attitude.

I thank every reader of this book for your attention and for the trust. I am humbled by the number of comments received on LinkedIn and Facebook: You, the reader, provided immense help in making this book better. I would also like to thank various people for providing support during the process of writing the book. In no order: Susana, Ewa, Ignacy, Dawid, Max, Jarek, Jerzy, Nina, Laura, Antonella, Eric, Ettore, Francesco, Liubov, Marco, Fabio, Giacomo, Saskia, Christina, Wieland, and Yossi. I am very grateful to my coauthor, Amita, for her valuable comments and suggestions. I am extremely thankful to the reviewers of this book, Eric Brewer, Corrado Zoccolo, and Sujit Pal, for going through the entire book content. Special thanks to my manager, Eyal, for supporting me during the writing process and for the trust constantly offered. Part of this book has been written in Charlotte Menora (http://bistrocharlotte.pl/), a pub in Warsaw, where I found myself writing pages after work. This is an inspirational place, which I definitively recommend if you are visiting Poland. Modern and cool as the city of Warsaw is these days. Last and not the least, I am grateful to the entire editorial team of Packt, especially Tushar Gupta and Tejas Limkar for all the support, constant reminders regarding the schedule, and continuous motivation. Thanks for your patience.

Amita Kapoor is an associate professor in the Department of Electronics, SRCASW, University of Delhi. She has been actively teaching neural networks for the last 20 years. She did her master's in electronics in 1996 and PhD in 2011. During her PhD, she was awarded the prestigious DAAD fellowship to pursue a part of her research work in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany.  She had been awarded the best presentation award at International Conference Photonics 2008 for her paper. She is a member of professional bodies such as OSA (Optical Society of America), IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), INNS (International Neural Network Society), and ISBS (Indian Society for Buddhist Studies). Amita has more than 40 publications in international journals and conferences to her credit. Her present research areas include machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural networks, robotics, Buddhism (philosophy and psychology) and ethics in AI.

This book is an attempt to summarize what all I had learned in the field of deep neural networks. I have presented it in a manner that readers find easy to understand and apply, and so the prime motivation of this book comes from you, the readers. I thank every reader of this book for being consistently present at the back of my mind, especially when I felt lazy. I would also like to thank professor Parongama Sen, University of Calcutta, for introducing me to the subject in 1994, and my friends Nirjara Jain and Shubha Swaminathan for the hours spent in college library discussing Asimov, his stories, and the future that neural networks behold for our society. I am very grateful to my coauthor, Antonio Guili, for his valuable comments and suggestions and the reviewers of this book, Narotam Singh and Nick McClure, for painstakingly going through the entire content and rechecking the codes. Last and not the least, I am grateful to the entire editorial team of Packt, especially Tushar Gupta and Tejas Limkar for all the support, constant reminders regarding schedule, and continuous motivation.