Well, I don't know what the formal requirements in your country are, but project-wise, I just looked on the Web.
Got a 2-year project via AngelList.
I just signed up to many freelance project websites and wrote applications like no tomorrow, when I started.
I didn't have many expenses back then and could live for a year from 4-6 months of work, so I only needed a few of the projects to work out, but I also only went for greenfield projects that would go for at least 3months and I would only bill per month or week, so I wouldn't get caught up in hourly billing formalities (what did I do today) etc.
If you're lucky, the customers will follow up with new stuff.
The next thing I did was content marketing.
I started with blog-articles, did some GitHub tutorials and finally some videos.
I wrote 2-4 articles per month for two years or so, but someday I got requests from people coming in. A publisher wanting to write a book and a startup wanting to do developer relation stuff for them.
So get on a well-known blogging platform and Twitter, and write about machine learning. There are more beginners than pros so even the basic stuff will get you recognition. But don't hope for quick wins here. For the first year, I just used my articles and GitHub repositories as "portfolio" to get some projects and they didn't have much value in themselves.
This is just how I did it.
Know a bunch of people who got a fine spot as a free consultant at a big corp rather quickly and never had to do any legwork after that. So your mileage may vary :)
Good luck!