Everything You Need to Get Started in Artificial Intelligence.
If you are an aspiring engineering student, researcher or anyone who is closely interested in the field of AI, and you want to learn how to get started then this is the article for you.
NOTE : I AM CONSIDERING THAT ALL OF YOU ALREADY KNOW PYTHON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE TO FULLY GRASP THE CONCEPTS OF AI, YOU CAN USE THE BELOW GIVEN RESOURCE AS A CRASH COURSE INTO PYTHON.
The New Paradigm
the basic textbook definition of AI goes like this :
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely known as a scientific field which aim is to make a computer, a robot, or a product to think how smart humans think. In the current scientific community, AI is an intensively studied area which is composed by multiple branches. Historically, machine learning and optimization are two of the most studied fronts, which are also studied by the actual scientific society thanks to the rise of novel and challenging research topics, such as transfer optimization, swarm robotics or drift detection and adaptation to evolving conditions in real-time. Also, the emergence of new paradigms, such as deep learning or explainable AI, has kept this field as one of the principal cornerstones of computer science along the years.
Now, we will discuss how to get started in the field of AI. From baby-steps to mastery.
Getting Started
These are the first resources that you should touch before anything else to get a basic gist of AI :
- Wikipedia, Investopedia — read the definitions
- Youtube Videos — start understanding AI
- Courses — understanding types/fields of AI
Jumping In
Now we begin understanding the basics and math behind our models. We will be focusing on Machine Learning for now.
There is the amazing Machine Learning Course by the Legendary ANDREW NG, that I would recommend to everyone. The best part is that “It’s free”.
I would suggest you to go through the video resources given below for supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning before starting this course.
Please do this course as this will give you insight into the 3 main categories of Machine Learning :
- SUPERVISED LEARNING [Classification, Regression]
- UNSUPERVISED LEARNING [Clustering, Dimensionality Reduction]
- REINFORCEMENT LEARNING [Auto-Learning, Navigation, Real-Time]
These are some resource for understanding each of the above mentioned fields :
Supervised Learning
Regression:
Classification & Neural Networks:
This video series from 3blue1brown is excellent for understanding these topics (Please make sure you watch all 4 parts):
Unsupervised Learning
These are some of the videos that will surely give you a good starting point
Reinforcement Learning
Below I have given the most simple introduction into this field:
Getting Serious
Now, If you have already done all the above mentioned resources. I have to say, WOW. It took me a long time to reach this position.
This would be a perfect time to start thinking upon your “niché”, which field of study do you find the most interesting?? And after you have decided that, just search for courses online that help you achieve this.
This would also be a great time to learn a framework/library for machine learning, the 2 of the most used frameworks in 2020 are TENSORFLOW and PYTORCH. Here are some of the courses that will help you get started in these :
Tensorflow :
pytorch :
To better understand how these frameworks function, I would advice you to read up on a series of Medium articles I did where I created a basic framework in Python from scratch.
Digging Deeper
I first got into Deep Learning, so for example these were the courses that I did.
Final Thoughts
This, this the final frontier of your AI journey. Now, there is not much spoon feeding to do. these are the few thing you can do going forward in your journey :
- Keep updated about the recent updated in the world of AI, a few of the outlets I use are Twitter and Slack.
- Keep practicing what you already know to gain mastery in your field.
- Try new algorithms and ways to get better results
- Do more and more projects and courses. You never know what new information you may find.
- Experience new field, try out Reinforcement Learning if you initially focused more on Deep Learning
- Understand the Math and the flow of Data
- VERY IMPORTANT!!! Start Reading Scientific PAPERS
Some good websites to download AI research papers are :
