So there you have it – 5 free eBooks (plus a bonus book) for your summer reading. It would be great if you would leave brief reviews of these books in the comments below – I'm sure all the authors would appreciate your comments and shares. Join the debate below and let me know your thoughts... About the Author Lee Baker is an award-winning software creator with a passion for turning data into a story. A proud Yorkshireman, he now lives by the sparkling shores of the East Coast of Scotland. Physicist, statistician and programmer, child of the flower-power psychedelic '60s, it's amazing he turned out so normal! Turning his back on a promising academic career to do something more satisfying, as the CEO and co-founder of Chi-Squared Innovations he now works double the hours for half the pay and 10 times the stress - but 100 times the fun! He also wanted to be rich, famous and good looking.

Sebastian Thrun smiles a little awkwardly as he explains why he no longer believes in the educational revolution he sold to the world just a few years ago. The lean, balding robotics pioneer has been instrumental in convincing investors, governments, and colleges to splurge millions on the online college education platforms dubbed MOOCs, or massive online open courses, billed as opening up quality education to anyone on Earth (see "The Crisis in Higher Education"). Thrun, a Stanford professor, helped birth the frenzy when he put his introductory artificial intelligence course online in 2011, accidentally attracting 160,000 students. Amazed by the response, he took time out from Stanford and also from a side job working on autonomous cars and other research at Google to found Udacity, a company offering MOOCs in computing, math, and physics. It attracted $160 million in venture capital investment and teamed up with San Jose State University to offer courses valid for college credit. But within two years of Udacity's launch, Thrun began to question whether MOOCs could make much of a mark on the world in their current form.

T ensors have a rich history, stretching over almost a century, and touching upon numerous disciplines; but they have only recently become ubiquitous in signal and data analytics at the confluence of signal processing, statistics, data mining and machine learning. This overview article aims to provide a good starting point for researchers and practitioners interested in learning about and working with tensors. As such, it focuses on fundamentals and motivation (using various application examples), aiming to strike an appropriate balance of breadth and depth that will enable someone having taken first graduate courses in matrix algebra and probability to get started doing research and/or developing tensor algorithms and software. Some background in applied optimization is useful but not strictly required. The material covered includes tensor rank and rank decomposition; basic tensor factorization models and their relationships and properties (including fairly good coverage of identifiability); broad coverage of algorithms ranging from alternating optimization to stochastic gradient; statistical performance analysis; and applications ranging from source separation to collaborative filtering, mixture and topic modeling, classification, and multilinear subspace learning. Index Terms --T ensor decomposition, tensor factorization, rank, canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD), parallel factor analysis (PARAF AC), T ucker model, higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD), multilinear singular value decomposition (MLSVD), uniqueness, NPhard problems, alternating optimization, alternating direction method of multipliers, gradient descent, Gauss-Newton, stochastic gradient, Cram er-Rao bound, communications, source separation, harmonic retrieval, speech separation, collaborative filtering, mixture modeling, topic modeling, classification, subspace learning. N.D. Sidiropoulos, X. Fu, and K. Huang are with the ECE Department, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA; email: (nikos,xfu,huang663)@umn.edu .

One of our greatest challenges in today's society is responding to the impact of technology automation. Over the last decade, technology has increasingly displaced jobs resulting in a reduction of the middle class and the widening gap of income inequality. Other factors such as offshoring play a role in job loss but the impact of technology is in full steam and there is no end in sight. My concern is that our society hasn't come to appreciate the extent of the issue and doesn't have a thoughtful plan to address it. The future of the middle class depends on our ability to comprehend the changing world technology has presented, and how we respond to close the jobs gap.

A key requirement for the current generation of artificial decision-makers is that they should adapt well to changes in unexpected situations. This paper addresses the situation in which an AI for aerial dog fighting, with tunable parameters that govern its behavior, must optimize behavior with respect to an objective function that is evaluated and learned through simulations. Bayesian optimization with a Gaussian Process surrogate is used as the method for investigating the objective function. One key benefit is that during optimization, the Gaussian Process learns a global estimate of the true objective function, with predicted outcomes and a statistical measure of confidence in areas that haven't been investigated yet. Having a model of the objective function is important for being able to understand possible outcomes in the decision space; for example this is crucial for training and providing feedback to human pilots. However, standard Bayesian optimization does not perform consistently or provide an accurate Gaussian Process surrogate function for highly volatile objective functions. We treat these problems by introducing a novel sampling technique called Hybrid Repeat/Multi-point Sampling. This technique gives the AI ability to learn optimum behaviors in a highly uncertain environment. More importantly, it not only improves the reliability of the optimization, but also creates a better model of the entire objective surface. With this improved model the agent is equipped to more accurately/efficiently predict performance in unexplored scenarios.

You must understand algorithms to get good at machine learning. The problem is that they are only ever explained using Math. In this mega Ebook written in the friendly Machine Learning Mastery style that you're used to, finally cut through the math and learn exactly how machine learning algorithms work. Using clear explanations, simple pure Python code (no libraries!) and step-by-step tutorials you will discover how to load and prepare data, evaluate model skill, and implement a suite of linear, nonlinear and ensemble machine learning algorithms from scratch. I live in Australia with my wife and son and love to write and code.

Artificial intelligence, machine and deep learning are some of the hottest areas in all of high-tech today. We've had a few generations of AI over the last 50 years, but in 2010, IBM kicked off the latest cycle with Watson, using brute-force, Big Data techniques to win jeopardy. The University of Toronto in 2012 pioneered Imagenet using deep learning to identify pictures. NVIDIA then began to drive the GPU-accelerated training technology of deep neural nets, and in the course of that, huge service providers opened up and announced initiatives beginning with Microsoft, Google, Apple, Samsung, and then Amazon. Chinese giants Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are of course, involved.

Leverage Python's most powerful open-source libraries for deep learning, data wrangling, and data visualization Learn effective strategies and best practices to improve and optimize machine learning systems and algorithms Ask – and answer – tough questions of your data with robust statistical models, built for a range of datasets If you want to find out how to use Python to start answering critical questions of your data, pick up Python Machine Learning – whether you want to get started from scratch or want to extend your data science knowledge, this is an essential and unmissable resource. Machine learning and predictive analytics are transforming the way businesses and other organizations operate. Being able to understand trends and patterns in complex data is critical to success, becoming one of the key strategies for unlocking growth in a challenging contemporary marketplace. Python can help you deliver key insights into your data – its unique capabilities as a language let you build sophisticated algorithms and statistical models that can reveal new perspectives and answer key questions that are vital for success. Python Machine Learning gives you access to the world of predictive analytics and demonstrates why Python is one of the world's leading data science languages.

Cluster analysis is a staple of unsupervised machine learning and data science. It is very useful for data mining and big data because it automatically finds patterns in the data, without the need for labels, unlike supervised machine learning. In a real-world environment, you can imagine that a robot or an artificial intelligence won't always have access to the optimal answer, or maybe there isn't an optimal correct answer. You'd want that robot to be able to explore the world on its own, and learn things just by looking for patterns. Do you ever wonder how we get the data that we use in our supervised machine learning algorithms?

UPDATE: Mar 20, 2016 - Added my new follow-up course on Deep Learning, which covers ways to speed up and improve vanilla backpropagation: momentum and Nesterov momentum, adaptive learning rate algorithms like AdaGrad and RMSProp, utilizing the GPU on AWS EC2, and stochastic batch gradient descent. We look at TensorFlow and Theano starting from the basics - variables, functions, expressions, and simple optimizations - from there, building a neural network seems simple! Deep learning is all the rage these days. What exactly is deep learning? Well, it all boils down to neural networks.