Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my Google colleagues, in particular the YouTube video classification team, for
teaching me so much about Machine Learning. I could never have started this project without them.
Special thanks to my personal ML gurus: Clément Courbet, Julien Dubois, Mathias Kende, Daniel
Kitachewsky, James Pack, Alexander Pak, Anosh Raj, Vitor Sessak, Wiktor Tomczak, Ingrid von
Glehn, Rich Washington, and everyone at YouTube Paris.
I am incredibly grateful to all the amazing people who took time out of their busy lives to review my
book in so much detail. Thanks to Pete Warden for answering all my TensorFlow questions,
reviewing Part II, providing many interesting insights, and of course for being part of the core
TensorFlow team. You should definitely check out his blog! Many thanks to Lukas Biewald for his
very thorough review of Part II: he left no stone unturned, tested all the code (and caught a few
errors), made many great suggestions, and his enthusiasm was contagious. You should check out his
blog and his cool robots! Thanks to Justin Francis, who also reviewed Part II very thoroughly,
catching errors and providing great insights, in particular in Chapter 16. Check out his posts on
TensorFlow!
Huge thanks as well to David Andrzejewski, who reviewed Part I and provided incredibly useful
feedback, identifying unclear sections and suggesting how to improve them. Check out his website!
Thanks to Grégoire Mesnil, who reviewed Part II and contributed very interesting practical advice on
training neural networks. Thanks as well to Eddy Hung, Salim Sémaoune, Karim Matrah, Ingrid von
Glehn, Iain Smears, and Vincent Guilbeau for reviewing Part I and making many useful suggestions.
And I also wish to thank my father-in-law, Michel Tessier, former mathematics teacher and now a
great translator of Anton Chekhov, for helping me iron out some of the mathematics and notations in
this book and reviewing the linear algebra Jupyter notebook.
And of course, a gigantic “thank you” to my dear brother Sylvain, who reviewed every single chapter,
tested every line of code, provided feedback on virtually every section, and encouraged me from the
first line to the last. Love you, bro!
Many thanks as well to O’Reilly’s fantastic staff, in particular Nicole Tache, who gave me insightful
feedback, always cheerful, encouraging, and helpful. Thanks as well to Marie Beaugureau, Ben
Lorica, Mike Loukides, and Laurel Ruma for believing in this project and helping me define its scope.
Thanks to Matt Hacker and all of the Atlas team for answering all my technical questions regarding
formatting, asciidoc, and LaTeX, and thanks to Rachel Monaghan, Nick Adams, and all of the
production team for their final review and their hundreds of corrections.
Last but not least, I am infinitely grateful to my beloved wife, Emmanuelle, and to our three wonderful
kids, Alexandre, Rémi, and Gabrielle, for encouraging me to work hard on this book, asking many
questions (who said you can’t teach neural networks to a seven-year-old?), and even bringing me
cookies and coffee. What more can one dream of?
Available on Hinton’s home page at http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/.
Despite the fact that Yann Lecun’s deep convolutional neural networks had worked well for image recognition since the 1990s,
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