Foreword

It’s hard to quantify how commonplace terms like neural networks and deep learning have become, and, more directly, how these technologies are impacting our lives. From automating routine jobs, to replicating difficult decisions, to helping cars drive themselves (and human beings) to their destinations, the power of neural networks and deep learning as techniques for revolutionizing computing is only in its nascence.

That’s why this book is so material and important. Not only are neural networks, AI, and deep learning automating routine jobs and decisions and making them easier, but they are also making search easier. Formerly, the state of the art in information retrieval and search involved complex linear algebra, including matrix multiplication to represent the matching of user queries to documents. Today, instead of using algebraic and linear models, the state of the art involves—as an example—the application of neural networks to discern word similarity between documents after learning how to summarize the documents into words using separate networks. And that is only one area in the search process where AI and deep learning are being used.