Preface

Through exposure to the news and social media, you are probably very familiar with the fact that machine learning has become one of the most exciting technologies of our time. Large companies, such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and IBM, heavily invest in machine learning research and applications for good reason. While it may seem that machine learning has become the buzzword of our age, it is certainly not just hype. This exciting field opens up the way to new possibilities and has become indispensable to our daily lives. Think about talking to the voice assistant on our smartphones, recommending the right product for our customers, preventing credit card fraud, filtering out spam from our email inboxes, and detecting and diagnosing medical diseases; the list goes on and on.