Acknowledgments

Assembling this book and the software to make it live would not have been possible without a supportive network of talented developers, mentors, and friends. These contributors came from a vibrant Portland community sustained by organizations like PDX Python, Hack Oregon, Hack University, Civic U, PDX Data Science, Hopester, PyDX, PyLadies, and Total Good.

Kudos to Zachary Kent who designed, built, and maintained openchat (PyCon Open Spaces Twitter bot) and Riley Rustad who prototyped its data schema as the book and our skills progressed. Santi Adavani implemented named entity recognition using the Stanford CoreNLP library, developed tutorials for SVD and PCA, and supported us with access to his RocketML HPC framework to train a real-time video description model for people who are blind. Eric Miller allocated some of Squishy Media’s resources to bootstrap Hobson’s NLP visualization skills. Erik Larson and Aleck Landgraf generously gave Hobson and Hannes leeway to experiment with machine learning and NLP at their startup.

Anna Ossowski helped design the PyCon Open Spaces Twitter bot and then shepherded it through its early days of learning to help it tweet responsibly. Chick Wells cofounded Total Good, developed a clever and entertaining IQ Test for chatbots, and continuously supported us with his devops expertise. NLP experts, like Kyle Gorman, generously shared their time, NLP expertise, code, and precious datasets with us. Catherine Nikolovski shared her Hack Oregon and Civic U community and resources. Chris Gian contributed his NLP project ideas to the examples in this book, and valiantly took over as instructor for the Civic U Machine Learning class when the teacher bailed halfway through the climb. You’re a Sky Walker. Rachel Kelly gave us the exposure and support we needed during the early stages of material development. Thunder Shiviah provided constant inspiration through his tireless teaching and boundless enthusiasm for machine learning and life.

Molly Murphy and Natasha Pettit at Hopester are responsible for giving us a cause, inspiring the concept of a prosocial chatbot. Jeremy Robin and the Talentpair crew provided valuable software engineering feedback and helped to bring some concepts mentioned in this book to life. Dan Fellin helped kickstart our NLP adventures with teaching assistance at the PyCon 2016 tutorial and a Hack University class on Twitter scraping. Aira’s Alex Rosengarten, Enrico Casini, Rigoberto Macedo, Charlina Hung, and Ashwin Kanan “mobilized” the chatbot concepts in this book with an efficient, reliable, maintainable dialog engine and microservice. Thank you, Ella and Wesley Minton, for being our guinea pigs as you experimented with our crazy chatbot ideas while learning to write your first Python programs. Suman Kanuganti and Maria MacMullin had the vision to found “Do More Foundation” to make Aira’s visual interpreter affordable for students. Thank you, Clayton Lewis, for keeping me engaged in his cognitive assistance research, even when I had only enthusiasm and hacky code to bring to the table for his workshop at the Coleman Institute.

Some of the work discussed in this book was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant 1722399 to Aira Tech Corp. Any opinions, findings, and recommendations expressed in this book are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organizations or individuals acknowledged here.

Finally, we would like to thank everyone at Manning Publications for their hard work, as well as Dr. Arwen Griffioen for contributing the foreword, Dr. Davide Cadamuro for his technical review, and all our reviewers, whose feedback and help improving our book added significantly to our collective intelligence: Chung-Yao Chuang, Fradj Zayen, Geoff Barto, Jared Duncan, Mark Miller, Parthasarathy Mandayam, Roger Meli, Shobha Iyer, Simona Russo, Srdjan Santic, Tommaso Teofili, Tony Mullen, Vladimir Kuptsov, William E. Wheeler, and Yogesh Kulkarni.

Hobson Lane

I’m eternally grateful to my mother and father for filling me with delight at words and math. To Larissa Lane, the most intrepid adventurer I know, I’m forever in your debt for your help in achieving two lifelong dreams, sailing the world and writing a book.

To Arzu Karaer I’m forever in debt to you for your grace and patience in helping me pick up the pieces of my broken heart, reaffirming my faith in humanity, and ensuring this book maintained its hopeful message.

Hannes Max Hapke

I owe many thanks to my partner, Whitney, who supported me endlessly in this endeavor. Thank you for your advice and feedback. I also would like to thank my family, especially my parents, who encouraged me to venture out into the world to discover it. All this work wouldn’t have been possible without them. All of my life adventures wouldn’t have been possible without the brave men and women changing the world on a November night in '89. Thank you for your bravery.

Cole Howard

I would like to thank my wife, Dawn. Her superhuman patience and understanding is truly an inspiration. And my mother, for the freedom to experiment and the encouragement to always be learning.