Thanks, you are right that I wasn't specific enough and I agree about impressive degrees and such, basicly that's why I quit grad-school :). I would say I have decent coding skills and good knowledge of machine learning, computer vision and related theory, as well as the hacker's hubris of not being afraid to start working on anything, no matter how hard it seems, with the hope of 'picking it up' on the go. Also the timeframe is difficult to specify, because one hopes to start a hobby project that turns into a lifetime of work (as Linux did for Linus for ex.)... Obviously if it becomes self-sustaining, it's perfect, if not, it can be done on the side with a day-job or such...