About the Authors

Primary Authors

Anirudh Koul is a noted AI expert, a UN/TEDx speaker, and a former senior scientist at Microsoft AI & Research, where he founded Seeing AI, often considered the most used technology among the blind community after the iPhone. Anirudh serves as the head of AI & Research at Aira, recognized by Time magazine as one of the best inventions of 2018. With features shipped to a billion users, he brings over a decade of production-oriented applied research experience on petabyte-scale datasets. He has been developing technologies using AI techniques for augmented reality, robotics, speech, and productivity as well as accessibility. His work with AI for Good, which IEEE has called “life-changing,” has received awards from CES, FCC, MIT, Cannes Lions, and the American Council of the Blind; been showcased at events by UN, World Economic Forum, White House, House of Lords, Netflix, and National Geographic; and lauded by world leaders including Justin Trudeau and Theresa May.

Siddha Ganju, an AI researcher who Forbes featured in its “30 under 30” list, is a self-driving architect at Nvidia. As an AI advisor to NASA FDL, she helped build an automated meteor detection pipeline for the CAMS project at NASA, which discovered a comet. Previously at Deep Vision, she developed deep learning models for resource constraint edge devices. Her work ranges from visual question answering to generative adversarial networks to gathering insights from CERN’s petabyte-scale data and has been published at top-tier conferences including CVPR and NeurIPS. She has served as a featured jury member in several international tech competitions including CES. As an advocate for diversity and inclusion in technology, she speaks at schools and colleges to motivate and grow a new generation of technologists from all backgrounds.

Meher Kasam is a seasoned software developer with apps used by tens of millions of users every day. Currently an iOS developer at Square, and having previously worked at Microsoft and Amazon, he has shipped features for a range of apps from Square’s Point of Sale to the Bing iPhone app. During his time at Microsoft, he was the mobile development lead for the Seeing AI app, which has received widespread recognition and awards from Mobile World Congress, CES, FCC, and the American Council of the Blind, to name a few. A hacker at heart with a flair for fast prototyping, he’s won several hackathons and converted them to features shipped in widely used products. He also serves as a judge of international competitions including Global Mobile Awards and Edison Awards.

Guest Authors

Chapter 17

Sunil Mallya is a principal deep learning scientist at AWS focused on deep learning and reinforcement learning at AWS. Sunil works with AWS customers in various transformation and innovation initiatives across verticals by building models for cutting edge machine learning applications. He also led the science development for AWS DeepRacer. Prior to joining AWS, Sunil cofounded the neuroscience and machine learning–based image analysis and video thumbnail recommendation company Neon Labs. He has worked on building large-scale low-latency systems at Zynga and has an acute passion for serverless computing. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from Brown University.

Chapter 16

Aditya Sharma is a program manager at Microsoft where he works on the Azure Autonomous Driving team. His work focuses on helping autonomous driving companies scale their operations by leveraging the power of the cloud, greatly reducing their time to market. He is the lead PM for Project Road Runner, the team behind the Autonomous Driving Cookbook. He also leads the Deep Learning and Robotics chapter at the Microsoft Garage. Aditya holds a graduate degree from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Chapter 16

Mitchell Spryn graduated from the University of Alabama with a dual bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and physics. While at the university, Mitchell was involved in a variety of research projects ranging from wireless power transfer to autonomous robotics. He currently works at Microsoft as a data scientist, specializing in distributed relational databases. In addition to his work on databases, Mitchell continues to contribute to projects in the robotics space such as the AirSim simulator and the Autonomous Driving Cookbook.

Chapter 15

Sam Sterckval, a Belgium-based electronics engineer, discovered his second passion (besides electronics) during his time in college—artificial intelligence. After graduation, Sam cofounded the company Edgise to combine these two passions—to bring artificial intelligence to the edge by designing custom hardware that can efficiently run complex AI models. Often considered the go-to person for edge AI in Belgium, Sam helps companies to build cognitive solutions that highly depend on low latency, privacy, and cost-effectiveness.

Chapter 10

Zaid Alyafeai is known for his popular blogs and Google Colab Notebooks on TensorFlow.js and using deep learning within the browser to power interesting scenarios. He is also a writer for the official TensorFlow blog on Medium, with many GitHub projects with more than 1000 stars combined. When he is not building fancy web applications, he is conducting research in AI as a PhD student at KFUPM in Saudi Arabia. A teacher at heart, he also wrote a reference book on advanced integration techniques.