Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI

#1

Post by meddy » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 1:19 PM UTC

Hey,

Since years I've been seeing tones of news "how machine learing did smth... " and today that's enough with just reading how other people change the world with AI. I want to join into this area and scientificly understand how it everything works - make my own projects...

-I'm a third-year Computer Science student who just has passed most of the needed courses like obj programming,python course, databases, math statistics, algebra etc... I really enjoy playing with data like projecting databases, programming backed etc...

Everything I know until today - I have learned on my own(swift, python, backend). Mostly by practice and solving problems. Now I really want to start serious journey with Machine Learning and AI.

But by making some small research which made me realised that I don't want just to implement already done frameworks for e.q face recognition (maybe I should?) I would like to understand the topic really seriously and be able to explore this area... ---but here's a problem because I don't know how to start it. I've got enthusiasm, some ideas for a projects, but still don't know almost anything about how exactly everything works.

When I was starting with programming, I read some books, watched online lecture and bang. I started doing my own projects. How to start in this more scientifically sophisticated area?

Are there any courses, books, online lectures which you can recommend me for a start to understand how it all works? Unfortunately, my university doesn't lead any more interesting courses in this area... People here are just fascinated with it but nothing more complex...

I'm still young so why not to lose time on something that seems to be really fascinating ;)

Re: Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI

#2

Post by sharemywin » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 1:46 PM UTC

These were to 2 books I had when I took AI classes in college(~1998) pre-deep learning, CNN etc..

http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu

https://www.allbookstores.com/book/compare/9780201533774

might be good for some foundational stuff. I felt they were pretty readable.

I remember having to do backprop in excel as one assignment.

Re: Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI

#3

Post by sharemywin » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

some free courses:

https://www.class-central.com/subject/ai

Some guys self made Master's program: https://hackernoon.com/my-self-created-ai-masters-degree-ddc...

Re: Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI

#4

Post by joshgel » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

I would highly recommend starting with course.fast.ai. Really helped me.

Re: Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI

#5

Post by darepublic » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 2:21 PM UTC

Think you should pick a project that seems reasonable and then start working on it, learning what you need to along the way.

Re: Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI

#6

Post by nrjames » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

IMO, to start with AI, it's best to start as simple as possible so that you understand the algorithms that drive things that are accessible to tweak. If you are a gamer, think about the various AI routines that control pathfinding, resource collection, and strategy for computer players in strategy games. Some of the concepts of BFS and DFS build into Minimax strategies and other types of "simple" approaches to searching decision spaces/states for optimal approaches to problem solving. This gets into the development of heuristics for approximating outcomes. All of this is fantastic baseline for understanding more complex AI and machine learning algorithms. While it's easy to jump into ML or AI at a higher level, without the baseline understanding of the search algorithms and probability landscapes that are underpinnings to advanced work in these fields, you'll probably never feel like you understand what is going on.

You can find some fun tutorials here: https://www.redblobgames.com

The CS 188 "Intro to AI" class at Berkeley is excellent: http://ai.berkeley.edu/home.html

It used to be on edx.org but I think a lawsuit about accessibility required them to remove it? Perhaps you can find it in the edX archives.

Edit: looks like you can find the lecture videos and other resources on the Berkeley site: http://ai.berkeley.edu/lecture_videos.html

Re: Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI

#7

Post by bhollan » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

Apparently Kaggle just opened a training/education branch.

https://www.kaggle.com/learn/overview

EDIT: I also second the fast.ai suggestion(s) as well

Re: Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI

#8

Post by throwaway2016a » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

This doesn't help answer your question (I don't think) by my observation...

I have the same question and I got my degree 12 years ago.

I remember my AI course in college consisted of implementing a neural net in Lisp and memorizing a ton of dense text.

It is really easy to take a Tensor flow model someone already wrote and tweak the parameters to make it work for your use case. I think that code reuse and open source is the largest advancement in AI in the last 10 years.

So a lot of companies can use AI in their products without even really knowing how it work.

Now once you start training your own models the hardest part to me is the vocabulary. So many tutorials and classes say "use this algorithm" or "take this code and modify it"... I want to know why I chose that algorithm, what were the other choices, and how do I write that code if I don't have an instructor to do the boilerplate for me. It is very frustrating.

Hopefully some of the answers here will answer some of those questions.

As another note, a lot of the advanced AI uses Calculus. algebra is not enough. I don't know what college you went to or what accreditation it has but by third year you should at least have taken Calculus II... maybe even Differential Equations. If you haven't, don't worry, 99% of programming jobs won't use them. But parts of AI will.

Re: Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI

#9

Post by atg_abhishek » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera and to go a bit deeper, his deep learning specialization on Coursera as well. Along with the programming assignments it's a solid way to get your feet wet. And definitely second the suggestion of the fast.ai courses as well

Re: Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI

#10

Post by bonkerfied23 » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 2:59 PM UTC

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Christopher Bishop.

Book: http://users.isr.ist.utl.pt/~wurmd/Livros/school/Bishop%20-%...

Notes: Its very very math heavy but if you really want to grasp the concepts and the idea around each topic, this is one of the way to go.

Online Lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbyG85GZ0PI&list=PLD63A284B7...

I like how he explains stuff and adds some context behind the math of each topic.

Alternative: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN3xxRkmTPmbKwht9FuE5A

A pretty good youtube channel that follows up on modern machine learning and he has all of his video tutorial demos on GitHub.

Hope this helps fellow Machine Learner :)