Publisher: Packt Publishing
Andrea Lonza
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular and promising branch of AI that involves making smarter models and agents that can automatically determine ideal behavior based on changing requirements. This book will help you master RL algorithms and understand their implementation as you build self-learning agents.Starting with an introduction to the tools, libraries, and setup needed to work in the RL environment, this book covers the building blocks of RL and delves into value-based methods, such as the application of Q-learning and SARSA algorithms. You'll learn how to use a combination of Q-learning and neural networks to solve complex problems. Furthermore, you'll study the policy gradient methods, TRPO, and PPO, to improve performance and stability, before moving on to the DDPG and TD3 deterministic algorithms. This book also covers how imitation learning techniques work and how Dagger can teach an agent to drive. You'll discover evolutionary strategies and black-box optimization techniques, and see how they can improve RL algorithms. Finally, you'll get to grips with exploration approaches, such as UCB and UCB1, and develop a meta-algorithm called ESBAS.By the end of the book, you'll have worked with key RL algorithms to overcome challenges in real-world applications, and be part of the RL research community.
Sayon Dutta
Reinforcement learning (RL) allows you to develop smart, quick and self-learning systems in your business surroundings. It's an effective method for training learning agents and solving a variety of problems in Artificial Intelligence - from games, self-driving cars and robots, to enterprise applications such as data center energy saving (cooling data centers) and smart warehousing solutions.The book covers major advancements and successes achieved in deep reinforcement learning by synergizing deep neural network architectures with reinforcement learning. You'll also be introduced to the concept of reinforcement learning, its advantages and the reasons why it's gaining so much popularity. You'll explore MDPs, Monte Carlo tree searches, dynamic programming such as policy and value iteration, and temporal difference learning such as Q-learning and SARSA. You will use TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to build simple neural network models that learn from their own actions. You will also see how reinforcement learning algorithms play a role in games, image processing and NLP.By the end of this book, you will have gained a firm understanding of what reinforcement learning is and understand how to put your knowledge to practical use by leveraging the power of TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym.
Remote Usability Testing. Actionable insights in user behavior across geographies and time zones
Inge De Bleecker, Rebecca Okoroji
Usability testing is a subdiscipline of User Experience. Its goal is to ensure that a given product is easy to use and the user's experience with the product is intuitive and satisfying. Usability studies are conducted with study participants who are representative of the target users to gather feedback on a user interface. The feedback is then used to refine and improve the user interface.Remote studies involve fewer logistics, allow participation regardless of location and are quicker and cheaper to execute compared to in person studies, while delivering valuable insights. The users are not inhibited by being in a new environment under observation; they can act naturally in their familiar environment. Remote unmoderated studies additionally have the advantage of being independent of time zones.This book will teach you how to conduct qualitative remote usability studies, in particular remote moderated and unmoderated studies. Each chapter provides actionable tips on how to use each methodology and how to compensate for the specific nature of each methodology. The book also provides material to help with planning and executing each study type.
Bryan Feuling
The world of software delivery and deployment has come a long way in the last few decades. From waterfall methods to Agile practices, every company that develops its own software has to overcome various challenges in delivery and deployment to meet customer and market demands. This book will guide you through common industry practices for software delivery and deployment.Throughout the book, you'll follow the journey of a DevOps team that matures their software release process from quarterly deployments to continuous delivery using GitOps. With the help of hands-on tutorials, projects, and self-assessment questions, you'll build your knowledge of GitOps basics, different types of GitOps practices, and how to decide which GitOps practice is the best for your company. As you progress, you'll cover everything from building declarative language files to the pitfalls in performing continuous deployment with GitOps.By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with the fundamentals of delivery and deployment, the different schools of GitOps, and how to best leverage GitOps in your teams.
Dipti Chhatrapati, Dipti Chhatrapati, Bjoern Rapp
Svetlana Karslioglu
Pachyderm is an open source project that enables data scientists to run reproducible data pipelines and scale them to an enterprise level. This book will teach you how to implement Pachyderm to create collaborative data science workflows and reproduce your ML experiments at scale.You’ll begin your journey by exploring the importance of data reproducibility and comparing different data science platforms. Next, you’ll explore how Pachyderm fits into the picture and its significance, followed by learning how to install Pachyderm locally on your computer or a cloud platform of your choice. You’ll then discover the architectural components and Pachyderm's main pipeline principles and concepts. The book demonstrates how to use Pachyderm components to create your first data pipeline and advances to cover common operations involving data, such as uploading data to and from Pachyderm to create more complex pipelines. Based on what you've learned, you'll develop an end-to-end ML workflow, before trying out the hyperparameter tuning technique and the different supported Pachyderm language clients. Finally, you’ll learn how to use a SaaS version of Pachyderm with Pachyderm Notebooks.By the end of this book, you will learn all aspects of running your data pipelines in Pachyderm and manage them on a day-to-day basis.
