Contributors

About the author

Maxim Lapan is a deep learning enthusiast and independent researcher. His background and 15 years' work expertise as a software developer and a systems architect lays from low-level Linux kernel driver development to performance optimization and design of distributed applications working on thousands of servers. With vast work experiences in big data, Machine Learning, and large parallel distributed HPC and nonHPC systems, he has a talent to explain a gist of complicated things in simple words and vivid examples. His current areas of interest lie in practical applications of Deep Learning, such as Deep Natural Language Processing and Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Maxim lives in Moscow, Russian Federation, with his family, and he works for an Israeli start-up as a Senior NLP developer.

I'd like to thank my family: wife Olga and kids Ksenia, Julia, and Fedor, for patience and support. It was a challenging time, writing this book and it wouldn't be possible without you, thanks! Julia and Fedor did a great job gathering samples for MiniWoB (Chapter 13, Web Navigation) and testing ConnectFour agent's playing skills (Chapter 18, AlphaGo Zero).

I also want to thank the technical reviewers, Oleg Vasilev and Mikhail Yurushkin, for their valuable comments and suggestions about the book contents.