Foreword

The World Wide Web is the underlying infrastructure of an internet-based information society. It is the primary tool that billions of people use to interact on the internet. Industrial progress is made by developing information services on the internet. Today, with the maturity of cloud computing and wireless communications, the web is becoming not only a platform for publishing and accessing information, but also a platform where information services can be developed, deployed, and delivered to billions of users anytime and anywhere. Big data provides rich content for building versatile services and also constitutes the means for enriching the services with intelligence and thus improving the user experience of services on the web. With such intelligent services, the web is changing our lives: it guides us to find the right restaurant, helps us to make the ideal holiday arrangements, enables us to purchase almost anything, and builds communities for a variety of purposes. Such intelligence is achieved through analyzing the data generated from interactions between users and the contents of the web. Building web intelligence is therefore central to today’s development of data science.

It is my great pleasure to present to you this excellent book, Algorithms of the Intelligent Web, Second Edition, revised by a young but very experienced data scientist: Dr. Douglas Mcllwraith. This book aims to reveal the soul of intelligent web applications: the underlying algorithms that realize the intelligence. This is an ambitious goal. What amazes me is that Doug has managed to present this broad subject comprehensively in plain English in less than 250 pages.

This book covers the most popular methods for a wide spectrum of applications. It provides a concise description of algorithms with their mathematical foundations and sample code in Python. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, and I hope you will share my enjoyment when you read it. More important, I hope that after you finish reading, you find yourself equipped with the skill and knowledge to make the web more intelligent.

YIKE GUO

PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR

DATA SCIENCE INSTITUTE, IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON