Biography

Dr. Jugal Kalita teaches Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, where he has been a professor since 1990. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1988 and 1990, respectively. Prior to that, he had received an M.Sc. in Computational Science from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada in 1984; and a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1982.

Dr. Jugal Kalita’s expertise is in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and the application of techniques in Machine Learning to Natural Language Processing, Network Security, and Bioinformatics. At the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and Tezpur University, Assam, India, where he is an adjunct professor, Dr. Kalita has supervised 15 Ph.D. and 125 M.S. students to graduation, and has mentored 100 undergraduates in independent research. He has published 250 papers in journals and refereed conferences, including prestigious conferences such as International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING) and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Dr. Kalita is the author of On Perl: Perl for Students and Professionals, Universal Press, 2003. He is also a co-author of Network Anomaly Detection: A Machine Learning Perspective, CRC Press, 2013; DDOS Attacks: Evolution, Detection, Prevention, Reaction and Tolerance, CRC Press, 2016; Network Traffic Anomaly Detection and Prevention: Concepts, Techniques, and Tools, Springer Nature, 2017; and Gene Expression Data Analysis, A Statistical and Machine Learning Perspective, CRC Press, 2021.

Dr. Kalita has received several teaching, research and service awards at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, in the Department of Computer Science, and the College of Engineering and Applied Science. He received the prestigious Chancellor's Award at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, in 2011, in recognition of lifelong excellence in teaching, research and service. More details about Dr. Kalita can be found at http://www.cs.uccs.edu/~kalita.

SUMMARY
Machine Learning: Theory and Practice provides an introduction to the most popular methods in machine learning. The book covers regression including regularization, tree-based methods including Random Forests and Boosted Trees, Artificial Neural Networks including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), reinforcement learning, and unsupervised learning focused on clustering. Topics are introduced in a conceptual manner along with necessary mathematical details. The explanations are lucid, illustrated with figures and examples. For each machine learning method discussed, the book presents appropriate libraries in the R programming language along with programming examples.

Features:

Provides an easy-to-read presentation of commonly used machine learning algorithms in a manner suitable for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students, and mathematically and/or programming-oriented individuals who want to learn machine learning on their own.

Covers mathematical details of the machine learning algorithms discussed to ensure firm understanding, enabling further exploration

Presents worked out suitable programming examples, thus ensuring conceptual, theoretical and practical understanding of the machine learning methods.