Acknowledgments
I want to thank my wife, Helen Stella, for love, support, patience, advice, and encouragement during the process of writing this book. You’re there when I’m winning, and you’re there while there are still challenges I have yet to conquer. Helen, I am lucky to have you in my life!
I’d also like to thank Dr. Jeffrey Luftig, from whom I learned that the key to business success is bringing together business competence and strong technical proficiency in scientific methods you’re using. His work and teaching had a profound impact on my thinking (for example, his book with Steve Ouellette [1], his paper “TOTAL Asset Utilization” [2], and his course content [3]). Jeff taught me how to align business and technology, and I learned from him how to apply Peter Drucker’s dictum that it’s more important to be effective (do the right things) than to be efficient (to do things right) [4].[1]
Peter Drucker, from “Managing for Business Effectiveness” [4]: “It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
I would also like to thank Steve Ouellette. Several years ago, I started writing a book quite different from this one, and Steve reviewed my early writing. This is, for all practical purposes, a very different book. Nevertheless, Steve’s thoughts on my previous writing helped me write a better book.
Most importantly, I would like to thank all the early adopters of AI and other novel technologies. You’re willing to take chances on the latest technologies, whose potential you have the vision to see, as opposed to playing it safe and opting for “what everyone else is using.” Without people like you, software, high tech, and progress in general can’t exist. You’re the unsung heroes of technology revolutions.
No book is the product of the author alone, and I would like to thank the Manning team. Associate Publisher Michael Stephens had the vision to understand what this book could become. All he had to work with at that time was a proposal for a book approaching AI projects from a different angle than any other book on the market. His ongoing help and guidance made this book possible. My copy editor Carl Quesnel has supplied a lot of invaluable suggestions regarding the style and the flow of the writing in this book, and the book is much better for his involvement. I would also like to thank my technical development editor, Al Krinker, for his technical review of this book and for pointing out many technical details to include in the text. In addition, I would like to thank my ESL editor, Frances Buran, who had the job of proofreading my initial drafts and correcting many spelling, grammatical, and typographical errors in them.
I would also like to thank the reviewers of this book. Our whole community owes gratitude to people like them. These reviewers are presented with texts and ideas still in draft form. They donate their considerable knowledge and experience to read and evaluate writing full of rough edges and then help authors to revise their rough ideas so that the whole community can benefit. I’m embarrassed to realize how rarely I think about the work of reviewers when I’m a reader of the finished book. As an author, I came to appreciate their role, help, and guidance, and I did my best to incorporate their advice in this book. Those reviewers were Andrea Paciolla; Ayon Roy; Craig Henderson; David Goldfarb; David Paccoud; Eric Cantuba; Ishan Khurana; James J. Byleckie, PhD; Jason Rendel; Jousef Murad; Madhavan Ramani; Manjula Iyer; Miguel Eduardo Gil Biraud; Nikos Kanakaris; Sara Khan; Simona Russo; Sune Lomholt; Teresa Fontanella De Santis; and Zarak Mahmud.
Although the whole team did their best to help me write a flawless book, I’m afraid that any published book will still have some errors and typos. My name is on the cover, and the buck stops with me. While I’m grateful to share the credit for many things that went well with this book, I invite readers to assign full credit for all errors, typos, and imperfections in this book to me.