Book excerpt: Consumers are now demanding and expecting more from technology. Building intelligence into our devices is a promising way to satisfy this demand by providing more personalized experiences. In Building Intelligent Systems the authors investigate how computer vision, machine learning, and data mining can be used together to build smarter devices and systems. Additionally, they explore some of the practical considerations of using artificial intelligence in the real world, tackling issues that are often overlooked in academic circles, such as performance optimization, benchmarking, robustness, and privacy.