Good Reads: AI-ML, Data Science, NLP, Entrepreneurship and Communication

“I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.”

- JK Rowling

Fields like AI-ML and Data Science are evolving by the day and require exposure to multiple literary sources. We have curated some good reads on AI-ML, Data Science, Natural Language Processing, Entrepreneurship, Communication and Leadership to help you become a thought leader in the field and expose you to interdisciplinary learning.

Plaksha Technology Leaders Program's global faculty and industry experts share books that have influenced them, left them wiser, more informed or got them thinking about ideas and concepts afresh!

Monojit Chaudhury
Principal Data and Applied Scientist at Turing India, Microsoft

Monojit is Principal Data and Applied Scientist in Turing India, where he builds large universal language models that forms the backbone of various Microsoft products. Prior to this, he was Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Lab in India. At Plaksha, he teaches 'The Introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Practical Natural Language Processing
by Sowmya Vajjala | Bodhisattwa Majumder | Anuj Gupta | Harshit Surana

Neural Network Methods for Natural Language Processing
by Yoav Goldberg

Speech and Language Processing
by Dan Jurafsky | James H. Martin

Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing
by Emily Bender

Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing
by Chris Manning | Hinrich Schütze

Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series)
by Ian Goodfellow, et al.

Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series)
by Kevin P Murphy

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
by Chris Bishop

The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You  
by Scott Page

The Book of Why?
By Judea Pearl

The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data
by David Spiegelhalter

Sebastian Ruder's blog on NLP
Great for keeping up to date with state-of-the-art NLP Research

Jay Alammar's illustrative blog
Great Illustrative explanations of NLP, Transformers and ML

Alexander Fred-Ojala
Founding Partner, Predli | Co-founder, Galiot | Faculty, UC Berkeley

Alexander was awarded Amazon's prestigious Innovation Fellowship 2018-2019. He has been a part of the founding team of three companies and has a successful track record of consulting for Fortune 500 companies, advising and running startups, and hosting executive education programs for business leaders all over the world. At Plaksha, he teaches courses on AI-ML.

An Introduction to Statistical Learning
by Gareth James | Daniela Witten | Trevor Hastie | Robert Tibshirani

The Elements of Statistical Learning
by Trevor Hastie | Robert Tibshirani | Jerome H. Friedman

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras and Tensor Flow
by Aurelien Geron

Deep Learning with Python
by Francois Chollet

Deep Learning
by Ian Goodfellow

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On
by Maxim Lapan

Designing Data-Intensive Applications
by Martin Kleppmann

Shubham Sahoo
Technology Leader Program, Class of 2020
Senior AI Evangelist @Jina AI | Author @O'Reilly Media | Co-founder @Kairos

Shubham is building the future of search at Jina AI to empower the next generation of the search ecosystem. He has co-authored ‘GPT-3: Building innovative NLP Products using Large Language Models’. He is also Co-founder at Kairos Data Labs, which is actively working to minimize the gap between state-of-the-art AI innovations and applied AI applications within organizations.

Deep Learning
by Ian Goodfellow | Yoshua Bengio | Aaron Courville

Natural Language Processing with Transformers
by Lewis Tunstall | Leandro von Werra |Thomas Wolf

GPT-3: Building Innovative NLP Products using LLMs
by Sandra Kublik | Shubham Saboo

Designing Machine Learning Systems
by Chip Huyen

Life 3.0
by Max Tegmark

Dr Jitesh Panchal
Faculty, Mechanical Engineering | Purdue University

Dr. Panchal's research was in the areas of Computational Design, Systems Engineering, and Human Behavior in Design. His study in engineering design was funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and several other companies. He has advised a host of students in research and application of design, not just at Purdue University but also Plaksha technology leaders.

The Design Thinking Playbook
by Michael Lewrick | Patrick Link | Larry Leifer

The Design of Everyday Things
by Don Norman

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
by Jake Knapp

Product Design and Development
by Karl T. Ulrich | Steven D. Eppinger

Srikanth Velamakanni
Co-Founder and Group Chief Executive, Fractal

Srikanth is the Co-founder, Group Chief Executive and Executive Vice Chairman of Fractal. Fractal is a leading player in artificial intelligence and transformative enterprise decision making space. Since Srikanth co-founded Fractal in 2000, the company has raised more than USD 300 million from institutional private equity investors. The unicorn serves more than 100 Fortune 500 companies with its AI, data and analytics driven business strategies. Under his leadership, Fractal has developed several product lines within the company including Cuddle.ai, Eugenie.ai and Qure.ai.

Life 3.0
by Max Tegmark

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein

Managing Oneself
by Peter F. Drucker

Flow
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Alok Mittal
Founder & CEO, Indifi Technologies

Alok is Co-founder and CEO of Indifi, a platform to expand access to debt financing for Indian SMEs. He is a successful first-generation entrepreneur based in India. He is also a founding member of Indian Angel Network - a forum for making angel investments.

Alok is passionate about creating value through startups. He is also keenly interested in entrepreneurship development in India. His specialties include starting and running businesses, entrepreneurship, early stage investing, technology investing, angel investing

Misbehaving
by Richard Thaler

Nudge
by Richard Thaler

The Singularity is Near
by Ray Kurzwell

David Law
Director of Global Programs | Entrepreneurship | Innovation | UC Berkeley

David has a long track record of successful program design and execution in corporate and academic environments. Currently at the Sutardja Center at UC Berkeley, he empowers future entrepreneurs, leaders and innovators to challenge the status quo.

Where Good Ideas Come From
by Steven Johnson

The Lean Startup
by Eric Ries

Art of the Start
by Guy Kawasaki

Mindset
by Carol Dweck

Drive
by Daniel Pink

The Power of Habit
by Charles Dunigg

Leaders Eat Last
by Simon Sinek

Outliers
by Malcolm Gladwell

Tribal Leadership
by Logan, King and Wright

The Hard Thing about Hard Things
by Ben Horowitz

Thinking Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman

Radical Candor
by Kim Scott

Crucial Conversations
by Kerry Patterson

Creativity, Inc
by Ed Catmull

Amit Kumar
Freelancer, Communications trainer, coach & consultant World Bank

Amit has 25+ years of cumulative experience as a communication coach, journalist, learning specialist, and manager in organizations across India, the US, Nepal, and Mauritius. His training experience spans across institutions such as the World Bank, Deloitte, Jamia Millia Islamia, and Jindal Stainless among others.

Just Listen
by Mark Goulston

Thinking Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman

Getting on Yes
by Roger Fisher | William Ury

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High
by Kerry Patterson | Joseph Grenny | Ron McMillan | Al Switzler

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
by Robert B. Cialdini

The TLP Team curates learning resources and expert recommendations that support interdisciplinary education, leadership development, and lifelong learning for aspiring technology professionals.