"The nature of statistical learning theory" was my favorite book during my PhD, and several years after. I still use "Elements of Information Theory" in my work. Recently a book has opened new horizons for me: "Prediction, Learning, and Games".
Do you have good books to advise?
"Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition" by Christopher M. Bishop
Given my topics (Computer Vision and Graphics), Zisserman's "Multiple View Geometry" is a reference that has not left my desk for the last two years. I also liked to read Strang's introductory "Linear Algebra" and Hecht's quite fully-featured "Optics" as they are well-written and provide lots of useful information
Sneath and Sokal 'Numerical Taxonomy' , Enrico Fermi 'Thermodynamics',
Blaise Pascal 'Pensees', Robert Laughlin 'A Different Universe', Robert Preisendorfer 'Principal Component Analysis for Metereology and Oceanography', all the Pavel Florenskij works....
It is a big question, at least for me. Books are important not only as primary source of information and knowledge, but as inspiration, motivation, as a source of ideas, an many others.
I remember, from BSc studies: Walter Rudin´s Principles of mathematical analysis; Analytic Geometry & General Topology, both written by Pavel S. Alexandrov; Kurosh´s General Algebra.
When learning programming I remember A Book on C (sorry, I forgot the author) and Prolog, Programming for Artificial Intelligences written by Ivan Bratko.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter helped me to write my lessons on Formal Systems and Mathematical Logic. More recently, when I was writing dissertation, I found very interesting and useful reading of Leontiev books: Problem of the Development of Psychs, and Activity, Consciousness, and Personality.
Alessandro,
Thanks for your references. Some of them are very interesting for me, specially Pavel Florenskij that I did not know. However, I would like to limit the discussion to work books related to the tagged topics.
My first book: C Programming Language. Brian W. Kernighan (Author), Dennis M. Ritchie
Pavel Florenskij had a very peculiar virew of the concept of 'form' that, beside the philosophical implications, was fundamental for me to aquire a specific view on the data analysis work that prompted me to look for 'invariant correlation structures' (by the way this is the geometrical meaning of form) as first step when approaching a data analysis task. By the way Pavel Florenskij was trained as a mathematician and his mathematical works were of crucial importance to go ahead the purely continuistic positivist view of science...
A few books, I read a lot.
The first and most influencial regarding programming and computing in general was
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs by Niklaus Wirth. It was a mind opener reading, I learned to program with it.
But I found a deep connection with A.I. with these 3:
Principles of Artificial Intelligence - Nilsson
Logic for Problem Solving - Robert Kowalsky
Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine - John Sowa
They were the foundation. I'm a mathematician in origin, so logic, probability and graphs are my thing big time.
I reckon Nilsson's approach to A.I. became outdated (the ideas are there but there's another way of doing it now), so a few yrs ago I attended to a course given by Peter Norvig to update, and AIMA is my reference text to A.I. since then:
Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach - Peter Norvig, Stuart Russel.
Nilsson was promoted to guru status.
Regarding A.I., Marvin Minsky books are essential, among these books I want to highlight: The Society of Mind.
An Intoduction to Prolog by Michael Covington
Natural Language Processing Techniques for Prolog Programmers
Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell
Thank you for your references. I can complete my scientific library. Marvin Minsky ! I do not have any books of this man. I am going to buy it.
Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell, I add it to my list.
There are many amazing books out there and we are all really standing on shoulders of giants, as the saying goes.
Some of those books have had a great influence on my way of thinking and perceiving the world. However, I would like to focus on those books in particular that have most influenced my work and have lit the spark of my curiosity the most.
I have actually started by reading about self-organizing maps:
http://www.amazon.com/Self-Organizing-Maps-Teuvo-Kohonen/dp/3540679219
The subtleties of language and beauty of natural language processing I first glimpsed while turning the pages of:
http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Statistical-Natural-Language-Processing/dp/0262133601
The first theoretical book that had really got me immersed in the topic was about the general framework of conformal prediction:
http://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Learning-Random-World-Vladimir/dp/0387001522
An excellent book on stochastic optimization:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Optimisation-Advanced-Topics-Computer-Science/dp/0077095065
Yet, the real eye-opener was the following discussion of the information-based view of reality:
http://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Reality-Universe-Quantum-Information/dp/B005X4CLZ0
Of course, there are many more books that are of really high quality and make an important read. I have read many great books on kernel learning and support vector machines, Bayesian methods, mathematical modeling and the general AI stuff (Russel&Norvig, Minsky, etc.). We are lucky to live in this time where information is much more accessible than it once was.
For me, there are two books worth mentioning: "Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness" by Richard Thylor and "Honest Signals" by Alex Pentland.
"Win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie and "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill.
Both have been very inspirational to me...:)
" The monk who sold his Ferrari", "Who moved my cheese". These books are very useful to change our attitude in positive way and create eagerness for achieving something in our life.
7 habits of Highly Effective People. Most old and most inspiring.
Most recently I have been profoundly affected by the wisdom contained in 'The Power of Habit'. It applies to business and personal change equally.
Three books that I liked very much
1) Artificial Minds by Stan Franklin
2) Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
3) Neural Network Learning: Theoretical Foundations by Martin Anthony and Peter L. Bartlett
There are so many books I liked. I mention some that I have enjoyed for contributing to the topic:
1.- Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human by Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin.
2.-Eye and Brain by Richard L. Gregory.
3.- The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett.
4.- New Science by Giambattista Vico.
5.- Darwin'sDangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
6.- Higher Cortical Functions in Man by Aleksandr Romanovich Luria.
7.- The Prefrontal Cortex by Joaquin Fuster.
8.- Electric Fields of the Brain: The Neurophysics of EEGby Paul L. Nunez and Ramesh Srinivasan.
9.-Electrophysiology of Mind: Event-Related Brain Potentials and Cognition by Michael D. Rugg and Michael G. H. Coles.
10.- Memory and Brain Dynamics: Oscillations Integrating Attention, Perception, Learning, and Memory by Erol Basar.
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond is the book that most influenced my work as a programmer.
These two early books will be a great addition to your list:
The foundations of statistics (Savage)
Optimal statistical decisions (De Groot).
[there are some newer books in this vein, but I have not read them yet]
If you are into RL, the Puterman book on MDPs is indespensible.
I also must recommend the MDL book by Grunwald.
In my evolution as a researcher from Artificial Intelligence to Speech Recognition, then to Pattern Recognition and at present, to Electron Microscopy, I strongly recommend these books. All of them are EXCELLENT in their category (obviusly, some of them are already obsolete, but when published, they were in the cutting edge of their matter):
Parallel Distributed Processing (3 Volumes)
David E. Rumelhart, James L. McClelland and PDP Research Group
Probability, Random Variables and Stochastic Processes
Athanasios Papoulis and S. Unnikrishna Pillai
Digital Processing of Speech Signals
Lawrence R. Rabiner and Ronald W. Schafer
Discrete-Time Signal Processing
Alan V. Oppenheim, Ronald W. Schafer and John R. Buck
Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis
Richard O. Duda and Peter E. Hart
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
Christopher M. Bishop
Pattern Recognition
Sergios Theodoridis and Konstantinos Koutroumbas
Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing
William H. Press, Brian P. Flannery, Saul A. Teukolsky and William T. Vetterling
Transmission Electron Microscopy: A Textbook for Materials Science
David B. Williams and C. Barry Carter
Advanced Computing in Electron Microscopy
Earl J. Kirkland
Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy: Imaging and Analysis
Stephen J. Pennycook and Peter D. Nellist
Statistics for experimenters: design, innovation, and discovery, by Box, Hunter & Hunter.
Apart from the books mentioned in many answers here, I also liked "You can Win by Shiv Khera". This was the first book that influenced and set my attitude and then followed other books including 7 habits of highly effective people on second spot in the list. On the professional front, "The Mythical Man Month" & "The cathedral and bazaar" changed my perspective on software & project management.
Geostatistics for Natural Resources Evaluation By Pierre Goovaerts, Oxford University Press, Applied Geostatistics Series, 1997, 483 p.
This is a excellent books of Geostatistics.
The biggest impact for me would have been `Creativity' (1996) by Csikszentmihalyi.
That also led me to EO Wilson's `Consilience' (1998)
And that led to `Evolution and Literary Theory' (Carroll, 1995)'
And that - led onto all these consilient books, here:
"On Consilience in the Arts/Humanities"
http://storyality.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/storyality-71-consilience-is-coming-read-all-about-it/
And amongst all that was Boden's `Creativity: Myths and Mechanisms' (2004) where she looks at creativity in A.I., in computers...
Cheers
JT
Dear Raphael,
since aI work with biomedical signal èprocessing, for me a milestone book is represented by the book of Kay Marple, "Spectral estimate: a modern perspective", 1984
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