Ashwin Rao is the Chief Science Officer of Wayfair, an e-commerce company where he and his team develop mathematical models and algorithms for supply-chain and logistics, merchandising, marketing, search, personalization, pricing and customer service. Ashwin is also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, focusing his research and teaching in the area of Stochastic Control, particularly Reinforcement Learning algorithms with applications in Finance and Retail. Previously, Ashwin was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and a Trading Strategist at Goldman Sachs. Ashwin holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Bombay and a Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Southern California, where he specialized in Algorithms Theory and Abstract Algebra.

Tikhon Jelvis is a programmer who specializes in bringing ideas from programming languages and functional programming to machine learning and data science. He has developed inventory optimization, simulation and demand forecasting systems as a Principal Scientist at Target and is a speaker and open-source contributor in the Haskell community where he serves on the board of directors for Haskell.org.

Section I. Processes and Planning Algorithms. 1. Markov Processes. 2. Markov Decision Processes. 3. Dynamic Programming Algorithms. 4. Function Approximation and Approximate Dynamic Programming. Section II. Modeling Financial Applications. 5. Utility Theory. 6. Dynamic Asset-Allocation and Consumption. 7. Derivatives Pricing and Hedging. 8. Order-Book Trading Algorithms. Section III. Reinforcement Learning Algorithms. 9.Monte-Carlo and Temporal-Difference for Prediction. 10. Monte-Carlo and Temporal-Difference for Control. 11. Batch RL, Experience-Replay, DQN, LSPI, Gradient TD. 12. Policy Gradient Algorithms. Section IV. Finishing Touches. 13. Multi-Armed Bandits: Exploration versus Exploitation. 14. Blending Learning and Planning. 15. Summary and Real-World Considerations. Appendices.