A lack of oxygen can reduce even the most furious flame to smoldering ash. But when fresh air rushes in, say after a firefighter opens a window or door to a room, the blaze may be suddenly and violently resurrected. This explosive phenomenon, called backdraft, can be lethal and has been challenging for firefighters to anticipate. Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have hatched a plan for informing firefighters of what dangers lie behind closed doors. The team obtained data from hundreds of backdrafts in the lab to use as a basis for a model that can predict backdrafts.

The machines, robots, IIoT devices, and applications used in the global supply chain create a deluge of structured and unstructured data. This has led to the emergence of advanced artificial intelligence- (AI) and machine learning-based solutions, designed to make sense of all this information and transform it into actionable insights for industry. AI-powered supply chain technologies bring order to the chaos of all this data. The benefits of applying AI to complex operational data are clear: enhanced visibility into the supply chain, faster decision-making, reduced cycle times, predictive analysis of big data, improved quality, productivity and throughput, greater supply chain resilience, and the ability to continuously tweak and improve your processes based on real-time insights into system performance. AI also empowers companies to make intelligent predictions about items as diverse as demand for a particular product or when to replenish stocks of raw materials used in manufacturing processes.

This book is intended to support data scientists and developers so they can quickly enter the area of text analytics and natural language processing. Thus, we put the focus on developing practical solutions that can serve as blueprints in your daily business. A blueprint, in our definition, is a best-practice solution for a common problem. It is a template that you can easily copy and adapt for reuse. For these blueprints we use production-ready Python frameworks for data analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning.