Acknowledgements
This book has been many years in the making: from the first ideas about probabilistic programming through creating the IBAL and Figaro systems to conceiving, writing, and polishing the book with Manning. Countless people have contributed their efforts over the years to help make this book possible.
This book owes its existence largely to the efforts of my team at Charles River Analytics: Joe Gorman, Scott Harrison, Michael Howard, Lee Kellogg, Alison O’Connor, Mike Reposa, Brian Ruttenberg, and Glenn Takata. Thanks also to Scott Neal Reilly who supported Figaro from the start.
I learned most of what I know in artificial intelligence and machine learning from Daphne Koller, my mentor and collaborator. Stuart Russell gave me the first opportunity to study artificial intelligence and has provided me with encouragement throughout my career, as well as being a recent collaborator and the author of the foreword to this book. Mike Stonebraker gave me my first research opportunity on his Postgres project, and I learned a lot about building systems from working in his group. Alon Halevy invited me to spend the summer with him at AT&T Labs, where I first started talking about probabilistic programming with David McAllester; this resulted in the probabilistic Lisp paper with Daphne. Lise Getoor, office mate and collaborator, was someone I could talk to about these ideas when they were first germinating.