When I was in college, I took Artificial Intelligence and Computer Graphics as electives. I took these instead of Computer Networking and Database Systems. All these years later and almost every software system I work on is a networked, database-driven application. Go figure. I never lost my interest in AI though (and computer graphics, for that matter). Fortunately, AI is having a pretty good run right now. I want to jump back into the material and bring my knowledge up to date. Specifically, I want to become knowledgeable in machine learning (ML).

I'm not yet sure how I'm going to go about learning ML. I have books galore and all the computing resources I could need. I have some specific interests in learning about graph neural networks and about hardware acceleration of ML systems. Those are both pretty advanced topics though, so it would be better to start small. My hunch is that learning the fundamentals of ML and becoming proficient with one of the major ML tools, like TensorFlow, is a good place to start.