Planning

I tend to easily get distracted. This is probably because I'm interested in a wide range of topics and easily get side-tracked and sucked down a rabbit hole.

As a consequence I tend to be a generalist that rarely gets anything done unless there is a hard deadline involved (and the Panic Monster kicks into action).

I am going to take two measures to try and counter-act these tendencies.

Firstly, I am forcing myself to write a blog entry at least every weekend which will focus my attention and hopefully result in some measurable progress.

Secondly I will enroll in some online courses that will have assignments with deadlines. Probably the blog will mostly be about the assignments of these courses.

To start off I will allow myself one day of researching courses, books, tutorials etc. before deciding on a "syllabus" for myself.

I searched the web for a bit and found that the best recommendations on course material and other online resources came from Quora, specifically these questions:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-MOOC-to-get-started-in-Machine-Learning/

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-learn-machine-learning-1

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-start-learning-artificial-intelligence

Based on these answers I have decided to start with a general machine learning course:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

and an introductory AI course:

https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-artificial-intelligence--cs271

as well as possibly

https://www.edx.org/course/artificial-intelligence-uc-berkeleyx-cs188-1x

These courses will force me to do some weekly assignments which should keep me on track. I plan on posting my thoughts on each assignment including my answers and how I got to them. Perhaps it might help others.

It seems that recent advances in AI and ML has started to create some popular techniques and theories, such as Deep Learning, Model Free Methods, Artificial Intuition etc. that some people consider to be such a paradigm shift from previous technologies that it makes them obsolete. As I already mentioned I am a bit of a generalist and usually need to have a very in depth knowledge about a topic to really be able to think clearly about it, so I will first focus on building a background knowledge studying the older techniques and then continue to the state-of-the-art techniques. However, I plan to do some reading on Deep Learning at the same time so that I have a good idea of the end goal. IT seems like the site http://deeplearning4j.org/deeplearningforbeginners.html has many good resources and links that I will follow. (more at http://deeplearning4j.org/deeplearningpapers.html)