I am going to be traveling for a machine learning convention in two weeks as well, but I'd love for a good place to find some background on this so I can maybe be successful in competing there.
I am going to be traveling for a machine learning convention in two weeks as well, but I'd love for a good place to find some background on this so I can maybe be successful in competing there.
If I only had 2 weeks of evenings and weekends to conjure up some ML knowledge, I would start there. Then you could move on to the courses from fast.ai (https://www.fast.ai/)
https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning
Everything is done in Octave (ie - open-source matlab-like language); primitives are vectors and matrices - so you'll have to wrap your head around that.
But that course gave me the first explanation as to how neural networks actually worked that I could understand; I had been reading about neural networks for years from various sources - books, online, videos, etc - and nothing ever "clicked" for me (mainly around how backprop worked). For some reason, this did it for me.
Since then, I have taken other MOOCs centered around ML and Deep Learning, mainly with a focus on self-driving vehicles.
Oh - ML Class also led one individual to implement this during the course, as the ALVINN vehicle was mentioned in more than a few ways:
https://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/
While Singleton does mention its "vintage-ness", I still think it's a sound project for inspiration and learning how to apply a neural network to a simple self-driving vehicle system, not to mention the fact that it replicated a system from the 1980s using today's commodity hardware; I recall reading about ALVINN when I was a kid, with wonderment about how it "worked" - it was one of several 1980s projects in the space that got me hooked on wanting to learn how to make computers learn.
It walks you through all the basics of deep learning (with PyTorch) with a concept video, code video, and then suggested project for each week.