Acknowledgments

A book is the opposite of an academic paper when it comes to attribution. In an academic paper, everyone who ever even grabbed lunch at the lab can get their name on the paper; but in a book, for some reason, we only put one or two names on the cover. But it’s not that simple to pull a book together; lots of people are involved. Here are all the people who made this book happen.

As I mentioned in the preface, the book grew out of (believe it or not) a blog post about dog poop (http://mng.bz/9YK8). I’m immensely grateful to the serious and accomplished people who took my cartoons about dog poop seriously enough to provide useful feedback: Roland Kuhn, Simon Chan, and Sean Owen.

In the early days of the book, the members of the reactive study group and the data team at Intent Media were invaluable in helping me understand where I was trying to take these ideas about building machine learning systems. I’m also indebted to Chelsea Alburger from Intent Media, who provided great early art direction for the book’s visuals.