Getting in to AI and Robotics

[cHk4]

It's something I've always wanted to do and I feel now is the right stage in my life that I'm ready to do it. I've heard about lego mindstorm and that it's a good place to start. What about online courses, are there any free good ones or are they all paid?

Thanks

 

[Thrash]

Have a look at the Arduino platform, cheap and loads of resources online.

 

[cHk4]

Have a look at the Arduino platform, cheap and loads of resources online.

Thanks mate

 

[D.P.]

My under grad was in AI and my PHD was in robotics. Good start would be to look at appropriate masters courses combined with as much math and statistics as you can stomach.
AI is a huge field, as is robotics. So you probably want to specialize. Are you interested in topics such as automated reasoning and theorem proving, control of dynamic system, statistics and machine learning, computer vision, signal processing, optimization, metaheauristic search, probabilistic inference, multi agent systems, swarm intelligence, natural language processing, symbolic systems, operations research, mechanics, localization and mapping, cognitive systems? They are all fairly different although with some overlapping concepts (math and statistics tend to crop up everywhere) and if you are limited in time then I would concentrate on a small subset.

There are some good online resources and books for some subsets. Artificial Intelligence a Modern Approach is an excellent book that covers many concepts.

 

[callummance]

Have a look at the Arduino platform, cheap and loads of resources online.

Try the Raspberry Pi platform for the same reasons. Got a bit more compute power too, which helps when building more advanced AIs.

*Plot twist: you can even use them both together using various kits!*

 

[dowie]

Good start would be to look at appropriate masters courses combined with as much math and statistics as you can stomach.

this one seems to offer that:

http://www.csml.ucl.ac.uk/courses/msc_csml/

 

[dowie]

some useful links:

firstly some awesome books:

http://christonard.com/12-free-data-mining-books/

one awesome youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/mathematicalmonk

the full version of the stanford machine learning course:

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3a6d-4052-937d-cb017338d7b1
(slightly watered down version also available on coursera - which gets you a certificate)

another useful course:

Computational Methods for Data Analysis

https://www.coursera.org/course/compmethods

some more stats/data mining:

https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1?utm_medium=listingPage

and another one - ok not machine learning but useful stuff - digital signal processing:

https://www.coursera.org/course/dsp

lastly - some more tutorials and a chance to have a go at some machine learning problems - potentially winning a prize and/or landing a job:

https://www.kaggle.com/competitions

facebook & a large UK hedge fund ran recruiting competitions on that site

 

[dowie]

this course starting in Jan... introductory level:

https://class.stanford.edu/courses/HumanitiesScience/StatLearning/Winter2014/about