ai is now viewed as breakthrough horizontal technologyakin to the advent of computers and smartphonesthat will have significant impact on every single industry over the next decade successful commercial applications involving machine learning include--but are certainly not limited to--optical character recognitionemail spam filteringimage classificationcomputer visionspeech recognitionmachine translationgroup segmentation and clusteringgeneration of synthetic dataanomaly detectioncybercrime preventioncredit card fraud detectioninternet fraud detectiontime series predictionnatural language processingboard game and video game playingdocument classificationrecommender systemssearchroboticsonline advertisingsentiment analysisdna sequencingfinancial market analysisinformation retrievalquestion answeringand healthcare decision making major milestones in applied ai over the past years the milestones presented here helped bring ai from mostly academic topic of conversation then to mainstream staple in technology today deep bluean ai bot that had been in development since the mid- sbeats world chess champion garry kasparov in highly publicized chess event darpa introduces the darpa grand challengean annually held autonomous driving challenge held in the desert in stanford takes the top prize in carnegie mellon university performs this feat in an urban setting in google builds self-driving car by many major technology giantsincluding teslaalphabet' waymoand uberhave launched well-funded programs to build mainstream self-driving technology according to mckinsey global instituteover half of all the professional activities people are paid to do could be automated by preface xiii