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Until recently, nearly every computer program that you might interact with on an ordinary day was coded up as a rigid set of rules specifying precisely how it should behave. Say that we wanted to write an application to manage an e-commerce platform. After huddling around a whiteboard for a few hours to ponder the problem, we might settle on the broad strokes of a working solution, for example: (i) users interact with the application through an interface running in a web browser or mobile application; (ii) our application interacts with a commercial-grade database engine to keep track of each user’s state and maintain records of historical transactions; and (iii) at the heart of our application, the business logic (you might say, the brains) of our application spells out a set of rules that map every conceivable circumstance to the corresponding action that our program should take. To build the brains of our application, we might enumerate all the common events that our program should handle. For example, whenever a customer clicks to add an item to their shopping cart, our program should add an entry to the shopping cart database table, associating that user’s ID with the requested product’s ID. We might then attempt to step through every possible corner case, testing the appropriateness of our rules and making any necessary modifications. What happens if a user initiates a purchase with an empty cart? While few developers ever get it completely right the first time (it might take some test runs to work out the kinks), for the most part, we can write such programs and confidently launch them before ever seeing a real customer. Our ability to manually design automated systems that drive functioning products and systems, often in novel situations, is a remarkable cognitive feat. And when you are able to devise solutions that work 100% of the time, you typically should not be worrying about machine learning.Fortunately for the growing community of machine learning scientists, many tasks that we would like to automate do not bend so easily to human ingenuity. Imagine huddling around the whiteboard with the smartest minds you know, but this time you are tackling one of the following problems: Write a program that predicts tomorrow’s weather given geographic information, satellite images, and a trailing window of past weather. Write a program that takes in a factoid question, expressed in free-form text, and answers it correctly. Write a program that, given an image, identifies all the people depicted in it and draws outlines around each. Write a program that presents users with products that they are likely to enjoy but unlikely, in the natural course of browsing, to encounter. For these problems, even elite programmers would struggle to code up solutions from scratch. The reasons can vary. Sometimes the program that we are looking for follows a pattern that changes over time, so there is no fixed right answer! In such cases, any successful solution must adapt gracefully to a changing world. At other times, the relationship (say between pixels, and abstract categories) may be too complicated, requiring thousands or millions of computations and following unknown principles. In the case of image recognition, the precise steps required to perform the task lie beyond our conscious understanding, even though our subconscious cognitive processes execute the task effortlessly. Machine learning is the study of algorithms that can learn from experience. As a machine learning algorithm accumulates more experience, typically in the form of observational data or interactions with an environment, its performance improves. Contrast this with our deterministic e-commerce platform, which follows the same business logic, no matter how much experience accrues until the developers themselves learn and decide that it is time to update the software. In this book, we will teach you the fundamentals of machine learning focusing in particular on deep learning, a powerful set of techniques driving innovations in areas as diverse as computer vision, natural language processing healthcare, and genomics.