Conversational AI with Rasa. Build, test, and deploy AI-powered, enterprise-grade virtual assistants and chatbots

Xiaoquan Kong, Guan Wang, Alan Nichol

The Rasa framework enables developers to create industrial-strength chatbots using state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning technologies quickly, all in open source.Conversational AI with Rasa starts by showing you how the two main components at the heart of Rasa work – Rasa NLU (natural language understanding) and Rasa Core. You'll then learn how to build, configure, train, and serve different types of chatbots from scratch by using the Rasa ecosystem. As you advance, you'll use form-based dialogue management, work with the response selector for chitchat and FAQ-like dialogs, make use of knowledge base actions to answer questions for dynamic queries, and much more. Furthermore, you'll understand how to customize the Rasa framework, use conversation-driven development patterns and tools to develop chatbots, explore what your bot can do, and easily fix any mistakes it makes by using interactive learning. Finally, you'll get to grips with deploying the Rasa system to a production environment with high performance and high scalability and cover best practices for building an efficient and robust chat system.By the end of this book, you'll be able to build and deploy your own chatbots using Rasa, addressing the common pain points encountered in the chatbot life cycle.

Practical Change Management for IT Projects. Transform your IT project and make change stick with this step-by-step guide with this book and

Emily Carr

Transform your IT project and make change stick with this step-by-step guide.In today’s fast-paced world of change, companies expect you to do more, with less. Drawing on over a decade of Change Management experience as a consultant with Fortune 500 companies including IBM and NCR, Emily Carr shares the secrets to making change happen smoothly.If your company is like most, the number one reason that projects have failed over the years don’t have to do with technology. They have to do with people. People didn’t like the new technology. People weren’t trained properly on the change. People hadn’t received adequate communications and didn’t understand the change. Sound familiar?Project teams rarely forget to work on the technology, but they often forget to work with the people, and no matter how amazing your new technology is, it’s useless unless people use it efficiently.This book will help you focus on the people.Packed with templates, checklists, and real-life examples, this user-friendly guide will provide you with the insights and guidance of an expert consultant, for a fraction of the price. You’ll follow a clearly laid out path from Change Management novice to confident and prepared change manager. You’ll be introduced to the Five Pillars of Change: Sponsorship, Stakeholder Management, Communication, Training, and Organization Design. You will work step-by-step through templates in each pillar to build and run a comprehensive Change Management plan tailor-made to your project and organization.

OpenStack for Architects. Design production-ready private cloud infrastructure - Second Edition

Michael Solberg, Ben Silverman

Over the past six years, hundreds of organizations have successfully implemented Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms based on OpenStack. The huge amount of investment from these organizations, including industry giants such as IBM and HP, as well as open source leaders, such as Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE, has led analysts to label OpenStack as the most important open source technology since the Linux operating system. Due to its ambitious scope, OpenStack is a complex and fast-evolving open source project that requires a diverse skill set to design and implement it.OpenStack for Architects leads you through the major decision points that you'll face while architecting an OpenStack private cloud for your organization. This book will address the recent changes made in the latest OpenStack release i.e Queens, and will also deal with advanced concepts such as containerization, NVF, and security. At each point, the authors offer you advice based on the experience they've gained from designing and leading successful OpenStack projects in a wide range of industries. Each chapter also includes lab material that gives you a chance to install and configure the technologies used to build production-quality OpenStack clouds. Most importantly, the book focuses on ensuring that your OpenStack project meets the needs of your organization, which will guarantee a successful rollout.

Hands-On Simulation Modeling with Python. Develop simulation models to get accurate results and enhance decision-making processes

Giuseppe Ciaburro

Simulation modeling helps you to create digital prototypes of physical models to analyze how they work and predict their performance in the real world. With this comprehensive guide, you'll understand various computational statistical simulations using Python.Starting with the fundamentals of simulation modeling, you'll understand concepts such as randomness and explore data generating processes, resampling methods, and bootstrapping techniques. You'll then cover key algorithms such as Monte Carlo simulations and Markov decision processes, which are used to develop numerical simulation models, and discover how they can be used to solve real-world problems. As you advance, you'll develop simulation models to help you get accurate results and enhance decision-making processes. Using optimization techniques, you'll learn to modify the performance of a model to improve results and make optimal use of resources. The book will guide you in creating a digital prototype using practical use cases for financial engineering, prototyping project management to improve planning, and simulating physical phenomena using neural networks.By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to construct and deploy simulation models of your own to overcome real-world challenges.

Microsoft Lync 2013 Unified Communications: From Telephony to Real Time Communication in the Digital Age. Being ahead of the game in communications is a great business asset. This book will educate you in the recent thinking on Unified Communications and clarify the technical side. It’s a revelatory read for both corporate and IT decision makers

Daniel Valik

AngularJS Directives Cookbook. Extend the capabilities of AngularJS and build dynamic web applications

Fernando Monteiro, Jan Carlo Viray, Dror Elovits, Juri Strumpflohner, ...

AngularJS directives are at the center of what makes it such an exciting – and important - web development framework. With directives, you can take greater control over HTML elements on your web pages – they ‘direct’ Angular’s HTML compiler to behave in the way you want it to. It makes building modern web applications a much more expressive experience, and allows you to focus more closely on improving the way that user interaction impacts the DOM and the way your app manages data. If you’re already using Angular, you probably recognize the power of directives to transform the way you understand and build your projects – but customizing and creating your own directives to harness AngularJS to its full potential can be more challenging. This cookbook shows you how to do just that – it’s a valuable resource that demonstrates how to use directives at every stage in the workflow. Packed with an extensive range of solutions and tips that AngularJS developers shouldn’t do without, you’ll find out how to make the most of directives. You’ll find recipes demonstrating how to build a number of different user interface components with directives, so you can take complete control over how users interact with your application. You’ll also learn how directives can simplify the way you work by creating reusable directives – by customizing them with Yeoman you can be confident that you’re application has the robust architecture that forms the bedrock of the best user experiences. You’ll also find recipes that will help you learn how to unit test directives, so you can be confident in the reliability and performance of your application.Whether you’re looking for guidance to dive deeper into AngularJS directives, or you want a reliable resource, relevant to today’s web development challenges, AngularJS Directives Cookbook delivers everything you need in an easily accessible way.

Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation. How to customize, use, and administer this powerful, Open Source Java-based Enterprise CMS

Vinita Choudhary, Pallika Majmudar, Munwar Shariff, Amita Bhandari, ...

Alfresco 3.0 has generated a lot of curiosity with its new content management features. Users have been waiting for a book that covers these concepts along with the security, dashboards, and configuration features of Alfresco 3.Alfresco 3 includes Alfresco Surf, a new N-Tier Architecture, which delivers scalability and accommodates more users on existing hardware resources. This new release also includes a draft implementation of the CMIS specification, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Protocol support. The new multi-tenancy features enable Alfresco ECM to be configured as a single-instance multi-tenant environment.This well-crafted and easy-to-use book is a complete guide to implementing enterprise content management in your business using Alfresco 3. It covers the enhanced document management, a new web-based collaborative application called Alfresco Share, and various integration options with external applications.Alfresco 3 offers true Enterprise Content Management (ECM) by providing an open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum, and Interwoven. It is the most popular Java-based CMS with over 1.5 million downloads, 50,000 live sites, 74,000 community members, and with more than 150 application extensions in forge. This book guides you through creating smart, collaborative content repositories and shows how to use Alfresco 3 to create more elegant document sharing, better collaborative working, and reliable automated workflow processes.The book also explains how administrators can set up Alfresco 3 for multiple business units as a single-instance multi-tenant environment. Business users can leverage Alfresco Share, a new built-in web-based collaborative content management application bundled with Alfresco repository. It simplifies capturing, sharing, and retrieval of information across virtual teams.This book shows you how to unleash the power of Alfresco 3 to create collaborative working systems in your enterprise

Learn TensorFlow Enterprise. Build, manage, and scale machine learning workloads seamlessly using Google's TensorFlow Enterprise

KC Tung

TensorFlow as a machine learning (ML) library has matured into a production-ready ecosystem. This beginner’s book uses practical examples to enable you to build and deploy TensorFlow models using optimal settings that ensure long-term support without having to worry about library deprecation or being left behind when it comes to bug fixes or workarounds.The book begins by showing you how to refine your TensorFlow project and set it up for enterprise-level deployment. You’ll then learn how to choose a future-proof version of TensorFlow. As you advance, you’ll find out how to build and deploy models in a robust and stable environment by following recommended practices made available in TensorFlow Enterprise. This book also teaches you how to manage your services better and enhance the performance and reliability of your artificial intelligence (AI) applications. You’ll discover how to use various enterprise-ready services to accelerate your ML and AI workflows on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Finally, you’ll scale your ML models and handle heavy workloads across CPUs, GPUs, and Cloud TPUs.By the end of this TensorFlow book, you’ll have learned the patterns needed for TensorFlow Enterprise model development, data pipelines, training, and deployment.