Geoff Hinton's Coursera course was what got me into it. It's not for the faint of heart. I might recommend Andrej Karpathy's cs231n as a more up to date source today.
Ask HN: What free resources did you use to learn how to program ML/AI?
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: Ask HN: What free resources did you use to learn how to program ML/AI?
#32If you were to spend a year or so going through many of the resources presented here, and probably knew your stuff pretty well (or at least as well as you could after a year), would anyone actually give you a job?
Re: Ask HN: What free resources did you use to learn how to program ML/AI?
#33I did the "early years" of both statistics and tiny neural networks/perceptrons in college a long time ago. It also helps that I use math at work (anything from simulated 3D physics to DSP.)
Since then, I've used Wikipedia and Mathworld when work had needed it. Regression, random forest, simulated annealing, clustering, boosting and gradient ascent are all on the statistics/ML spectrum.
But the best resource was running NVIDIA DIGITS, training some of the stock models, and really looking deeply at the visualizations available. You could do this on your own computer, or these days, rent some spot GPU instance on ECC for cheap.
I highly recommend going through the DIGITS tutorials if you want a crash course in deep learning, and make sure to visualize all the steps! Try a few different network topologies and different depths to get a feel for how it works.
Re: Ask HN: What free resources did you use to learn how to program ML/AI?
#34If you were to spend a year or so going through many of the resources presented here, and probably knew your stuff pretty well (or at least as well as you could after a year), would anyone actually give you a job?
Nobody is "given" a job; you "earn" a job by convincing the hiring manager that you can do what they need done.
If you're any good, and have good results to show and talk about, yes, you could totally be employed.
If you show that you're extra willing to do all the heavy data preparation and labeling work yourself as well as the infrastructure that runs the models, you'll have an even easier time. Most people just want to play with models, and believe data preparation is "beneath" them, but that's actually where the meat is and where the success of the model is made or destroyed.
Re: Ask HN: What free resources did you use to learn how to program ML/AI?
#35For Deep Learning, deeplearning.ai has launched a free course on Coursera, which you may want to check out.
Re: Ask HN: What free resources did you use to learn how to program ML/AI?
#36The free Azure ML tutorials are pretty cool.
Re: Ask HN: What free resources did you use to learn how to program ML/AI?
#37arxiv.org to learn the models, SemanticScholar to find connections between papers, GitHub search to find other people's implementations
...and Andrej Karpathy's Sanity Preserver website to search and review Arxiv papers more easily: http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/
Re: Ask HN: What free resources did you use to learn how to program ML/AI?
#38For the math: MIT OCW Scholar and maybe Klein's Coding the Matrix.
For AI specifically, MOOCS on Coursera, edx, and Udacity will give you plenty of options. The ones by big names like Thrun, Norvig, and Ng are great places to start.
It really helps to already be comfortable with algorithms. Princeton's MOOCs on Algorithms by Bob Sedgewick on Coursera would be a great place to start.
Re: Ask HN: What free resources did you use to learn how to program ML/AI?
#39arxiv.org to learn the models, SemanticScholar to find connections between papers, GitHub search to find other people's implementations
...and Andrej Karpathy's Sanity Preserver website to search and review Arxiv papers more easily: http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/
Wow, that is really cool, thanks for sharing that! The YouTube video explaining it is here, well worth the short watch: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S2GY3gh6qC8
Re: Ask HN: What free resources did you use to learn how to program ML/AI?
#40If you are into watching programming videos, I would recommend Siraj Raval Youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN3xxRkmTPmbKwht9FuE5A It is quirky, funny and above all very short and crisp and gives you a quick overview of things. Most of his videos are related to AI/ML.
I think Siraj is a tool user, not a tool maker.
He just pipes input through bunch of libraries that are available off the shelf. Does that produce a useful output? Sure. Could he write any of them himself, or explain how any of them work beyond a superficial overview? I doubt it.