Frontlist | Indian American Teen Siddharth Sharma Writes Book on AI

Frontlist | Indian American Teen Siddharth Sharma Writes Book on AI
on Oct 19, 2020

An Indian American high school senior in Northern California has published a textbook focused on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Siddharth Sharma, a senior at San Jose, California-based BASIS Independent Silicon Valley, published the 280-page, “A Guide to Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and its Applications,” with a team of high schoolers around the U.S., he told India-West in an email. The book is available on Amazon for $14.99, and, according to Sharma, has sold “several copies across four countries.” Additionally, the book has been endorsed by professors at Stanford University, the teen boasted. “The idea for the book came through a nonprofit organization that I started, StartOnAI,” he explained. “I established StartOnAI two years ago when I saw that AI and machine learning is not accessible to most students and requires advanced math and computer science knowledge to get started,” Sharma added. “Currently, we have a team of 25 students from across the United States and 3 total countries. We have published over 24 tutorials on our site for students and beginners.” StartOnAI was also recognized by the White House and inducted into the CSforALL education consortium, Sharma noted. A Guide to Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and its Applications is a full breakdown of AI and explains the content smoothly, without knowledge of prerequisites like advanced math and programming knowledge. At time of press, the textbook had a 4.8-star rating on eight reviews on Amazon. One reviewer said, “As an ML student myself, I think this book would serve anyone well who want to quickly expand and consolidate their ML knowledge and implementation abilities.” Another wrote, “Anyone who wants to get into this exponentially rising field in our world today should definitely take advantage of this book and all of its conceptual depictions and the practical applications that allow one to gain sufficient knowledge to have a very strong foundational understanding in Artificial Intelligence.”