Ask HN: How to get involved with AI as a non-AI programmer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to get involved with AI as a non-AI programmer?

30 pointshndatapagan8 comments

As someone interested in AI, but with no real technical knowledge of the field, I find it hard to dive in. I could certainly start learning AI programming, but the math involved seems a bit out of reach.

Are there any online courses or books that can teach you the basic concepts of AI? I'm trying to really look at different business and design opportunities with the AI field, and I'm wondering if that's possible without the technical understanding of knowing how to program AI.

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AI software projects need people who are good at builds and version control and releases and other things that you might not learn to do at a professional level in CS graduate There is a huge amount of chopping wood and carrying water to do.

It is already getting less important to know the algorithms than it used to be because everybody and his brother has been working on algorithms for the last few years and now you find them automated, overseen by an "expert systems" in products like this:

https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/

I may be biased, but I also think some of the "old AI" ideas are coming back, and it is very clear that logic programming and rules engines can be improved upon greatly.

For instance you look at Drools and think it might be pretty cool but then you write some code and fight with a compiler that can't give sensible error messages and then...

Something can be done about it

Berkeley's Aritifical Intelligence course,CS-188 is a great content base for concepts. The projects of the course include the implementation of search algorithms with Pac-Man. If machine learning is more interesting to you, Udacity's Introduction to Machine Learning is very approachable. If you are interested in learning in a traditional fashion, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Peter Norvig is a widely used AI textbook.

You may want to have a look at the 2015 projects from Andrew Ng's course at Stanford for some trends in machine learning too http://cs229.stanford.edu/projects2015.html

A friend/ex-coworker of mine recently got a job at an AI company with no previous AI history as a software engineer. AI researchers need tools, systems, etc, that a programmer with little specific AI experience can contribute. Aside from also learning the topics etc in your spare time it seems like a good way to get into a relevant company early and work to a more AI-involved position from there.

As a non-AI programmer who's currently slogging through the material, you really need to get your math up to speed. Linear algebra, statistics, probability theory, and multivariate calculus. There are courses on these on Khan Academy and other MOOCs (or you can do what I'm doing and go back to uni).

It's really hard to get a sense of why you're doing this-and-that without those fundamentals.

The introductory videos from PyCon are very accessible to anyone with a little programming knowledge, no math needed: https://github.com/jakevdp/sklearn_pycon2015

You aren't going to be an expert without math, but you can learn enough to evaluate ML related business ideas.

This might be of interest: http://www.constructedintellect.com/learning-ai-resources-li...

Read AIMA, Know your maths, discrete maths, probability & stats. Take some machine learning courses (free ones at coursera, edx, etc), read up on Deep learning, you should be good to go.

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