Consulting services

I offer consulting services in software development, advisor, and mentor roles, specializing in deep learning, general artificial intelligence, large scale distributed systems, recommender systems, Semantic Web and linked data, and natural language processing.

My rate is $60/hour.

Email me at markw @ markwatson.com and include a brief description of the project that you would like to talk about and I will email you a Zoom link for a talk. I offer 1 hour of free mentoring (see below), so if you want to hire me, please start with a free mentoring session so you can get an idea what it would be like to work with me.

I work as a limited liability consultant so add the text "Both the CONSULTANT and CUSTOMER agree that the CONSULTANT functions as a limited liability consultant: the CONSULTANT's legal liability for any customer project is limited to the amount of money paid to the CONSULTANT to perform work on the project." to any work agreement/NDA that you ask me to sign.

Some customers choose to just use my limited liability consultant agreement but I am happy to use your standard agreement with the above statement of limited liability added.

Click on the following image to pay me for consulting/advising/mentoring work via PayPal:

The books that I have written

After 20 years of writing for the publishers Springer-Verlag, McGraw-Hill, Morgan Kaufman, APress, Sybex, and J. Wiley (see material below), in 2013 I started a side business of self publishing my current writing projects as eBooks that are frequently updated.

My latest eBooks are all available for purchase on LeanPub or be read here online for FREE:

These books are licensed under “Creative Commons Share and Share Alike, No Commercial Reuse” so you can find these as PDFs, Kindle format and iBook ePub format on the web and share them with your friends:

To be released April 2023: LangChain and Llama-Index Projects Lab Book: Hooking Large Language Models Up to the Real World - Using GPT-3, ChatGPT, and Hugging Face Models in Applications purchase on leanpub

Released 2023-02-01: Practical Python Artificial Intelligence Programming purchase on leanpub: covers with Python a variety of topics dealing with Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Good Old Fashioned Symbolic AI, and the Semantic Web. Read online for FREE

Updated 2021-07-12: Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming With Clojure purchase on leanpub: covers with Clojure a variety of topics dealing with Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Data Science, and the Semantic Web. Read online for FREE

Updated 2021-07-12: Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer’s Secret Weapon purchase on leanpub: contains examples of deep learning, back-propagation and Hopfield neural networks, using the CLML machine learning library, heuristic search, and using Common Lisp clients for: MongoDB, Solr, CouchDB, and relational databases. For the older 3rd edition I added a chapter using my Natural Language Processing (NLP) library and a short chapter on information gathering and in the 4th edition I added two new chapters on the semantic web. Read online for FREE

Updated 2020-06-13: Haskell Tutorial and Cookbook purchase on leanpub: a gentle introduction to the Haskell programming language. Read online for FREE

Updated 2020-07-10: Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming With Java purchase on leanpub: covers a variety of topics dealing with Artificial Intelligence, Information Gathering, Data Science, and the Semantic Web. Read online for FREE

Updated 2020-10-03: A Lisp Programmer Living in Python-Land: The Hy Programming Language (all examples in both Hy and Python). Covers AI, semantic web + Knowledge Graphs, and NLP. The text covers the Hy language but all examples are provided also in Python. purchase on leanpub. Read online for FREE

My Older Free Open Content Web Books:

License for my Free Web Books: [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/](Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0)

Additional license terms: The work is published “AS IS” with no implied or expressed warranty - you accept all risks for the use of both the Free Web Book and any software program examples that are bundled with the work.

Practical Semantic Web and Linked Data Applications, Common Lisp Edition

Download the PDF

Practical Semantic Web and Linked Data Applications, Java, Scala, Clojure, and JRuby Edition

Download the PDF

My Older Published Books:

“Scripting Intelligence: Web 3.0 Information, Gathering and Processing”, APress 2009

This book covers the Semantic Web, Linked Data, Scaling web applications, using map reduce for large scale data processing, web mashups, text mining, natural language processing, ActiveRecord, Datamapper, Ruby clients for CouchDB, Sesame, AllegroGraph, scaling for large data, geohash and geolocation, Solr, Nutch, Sphinx, web scraping and storing data as RDF, linked data, Hadoop map reduce, and web mashups.

Github repository

“Java 10 Minute Solutions”, Sybex, 2004

This book covers short examples that solve common Java programming problems, including: XML (SAX, DOM, XSLT), thread management, JDBC, ant, XDoclet, servlets/JSP/struts, search algorithms, etc.

Here is a link to download the example files

“Intelligent Java Applications for the Internet and Intranets”, 1997 Morgan Kaufman (Many Distributed AI examples developed in Java)

NOTE: This book is out of print, and the examples were written using Java 1.0 in 1996.

“Common LISP Modules. Artificial Intelligence in the Era of Neural Networks and Chaos Theory”, Springer-Verlag 1991

Here is a link to download the example files

Other published books:

• Sun ONE Services", 2001 M&T Press (Hungry Minds). This book covers the Java enterprise J2EE 2 APls and XML technologies that comprise the Sun ONE platform - EJBs, servlets, JSPs, JNDI, UDDI, ebXML, SOAP, WSDL, and JAXP.
• Linux Programming Unleashed", 1999 MCP. I was a co-author on the first edition and didn’t contribute to later editions.
• Java Programming for Windows: Using Microsoft AFC, WFC, and XML, 1998 Morgan Kaufman. This was a great book (one of the first examples of XML services) but it was printed about a month after the Sun vs. Microsoft litigation started. Oh well.
• “Understanding UML: The Developer’s Guide: With a Web-Based Application in Java”, Paul Harmon and Mark Watson, Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 1997
• “Creating JavaBeans: Components for Distributed Applications”, Morgan Kaufman, 1997
• “C++ Power Paradigms”, McGraw-Hill 1994. Genetic Algorithms, Neural Networks, and Constraint Programming.
• “Portable User Interface Programming in C++, second edition”, McGraw-Hill 1995. Windows, Windows 95, NT, OS/2 PM, Macintosh, and X Windows. Download examples
• “AI Agents in Virtual Reality Worlds”, J. Wiley 1996. C++ framework for AI in games.
• “Programming in Scheme “, Springer Verlag 1996. Learn Scheme programming using AI examples.
• “Programming Intelligent Agents for the Internet”, McGraw-Hill 1996. For Windows 95 and NT programmers who want to automate retrieval of information from the Internet. All examples also provided for Unix systems.)

Fun stuff

In addition to programming and writing my hobbies are cooking, photography, hiking, travel, and playing music on guitar, didgeridoo, and American Indian flute:

My guitar playing: a boogie riff

My didgeridoo playing

My Spanish guitar riff

Playing with George (didgeridoo), Carol and Crystal (drums and percussion) and Mark (Indian flute)

Open Source

My Open Source projects are hosted on my github account so please check that out!

My projects are written in a variety of languages: Haskell, Ruby, Clojure, JavaScript, Java, Common Lisp, Python, and Smalltalk.

I hope that you find these projects useful. Pull requests are welcome!

Free Mentoring

I offer 1 hour of free mentoring for both individuals and companies (for group/team mentoring, let's keep the group small - 4 or 5 people is fine). Email me at markw @ markwatson.com and include a brief description of the topic(s) you would like to talk about (e.g., technology, change of life plans, education, etc.) and I will email you a Zoom link for a talk.

Any advice I give you is without warranty: you just get my honest opinion and feedback.

Privacy Policy

This is a static site and I collect no private data.

My blog is hosted on Google's Blogger as a separate web site.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, You can contact us:

• By visiting this page on our website: https://markwatson.com/privacy.html