Hey,<p>I am currently finishing my second year of study as a Computer Science Major. About 12 credits away from my AA. Honestly... These programming classes suck. They don't teach me much other than printing out to the screen and getting a bit of input. Maybe a bit of manipulation but that is mostly it.
I have tried to do stuff on my own and read through beginner books (Intro/Begginer books on C++, C, Lua, Python) and even the "Serious" programmer books (Currently reading Pragmatic Programmer. Next on the list is Code Complete and Productive Programmer). I just lose my way though. Once I know some of the language, I try to think of ways to make little projects and such but to no avail.
I want to work with AI. Mainly Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. It's just what I want to do. Is there any advice anyone is willing to give? Maybe some open source project to point me to?<p>Thanks for reading. Have a nice Day/Night! xD
Jorge
You're stuck where I was about a year and a half ago. My classes basically sucked, and all I got out of 2 years in my Comp.Sci course was how to make small applets in Java, and how to print patterns in C++. I know it can be demotivating. My advice? Start following projects. Read the code written by people working on some of the most awesome projects out there. No, really <i>read</i> it. Don't understand something? Go find documentation for it. No documentation? Email the people working on the project or go to their Mailing list/IRC channel. People in the open source community are generally polite and very helpful. There's tons of stuff out there. Oh, and stop switching languages. I decided that I won't try anything besides the 2 languages that I already know well enough (C++ and Python), until I become really really good at them.<p>As for your desire to learn NLP and ML, as michaelpinto said, follow the courses of Coursera, and you can also try to reach out to Dan.But I would suggest doing small project (a blogging engine, a small game, whatever strikes your fancy) first. Because that kind of stuff is just as important as learning theory. Because until you've done something, you'll keep thinking of yourself as a beginner.<p>For finding projects? Go to Github, Bitbucket etc. I won't recommend anything myself, because it has to be something you yourself are comfortable with. And you'll actually have to read the existing code before starting to contribute. I guarantee you, you'll learn something new.<p>Best of luck!
I'm no expert, but it sounds like you want to learn to run a marathon before you can crawl. However that said if you have a passion for something pursue it with gusto: Read every book, article and blog that you can find on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning and find someone who is a true master. Then ask that person how to get started.<p>I did a quick casual search and found this: <a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/nlp" rel="nofollow">https://www.coursera.org/course/nlp</a><p>I would try to contact Dan and see what he thinks: <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/" rel="nofollow">http://www.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/</a><p>What's the worst that can happen? Reach out...