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by Enginerrrd 2433 days ago
Man this is me. Knowing a bit of coding and machine learning in engineering has been such a boon over my career in civil/environmental engineering.

But it's like math, if you know it well enough, you'll find ways to use it everywhere. If you don't, you won't. You have to be the type of person that likes to innovate. Its hard to sell to prospective employers, but its great for demonstrating value once you are with an organization. All of my previous employers fight over trying to get me back when I've found myself looking for work. ...Now I work for myself and make my own work and I've priced myself out of their offers, but that's not so bad.
1 comments
hiram112 2433 days ago
How much machine learning have you been able to pick up and did you learn formally (in school) or just on your own? It's a broad subject, so where would you recommend one begin, assuming I have a decent undergrad math background? Thanks!
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pbhjpbhj 2433 days ago
Not the parent, but I did an undergrad maths/physics degree some time back and found https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning to be good as an introduction, unfortunately a new job [unrelated] has prevented my finishing the course but I hope to pick it up again later in the Winter.

I would be interested in thoughts from anyone with ML experience who has reviewed said course's materials?

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Enginerrrd 2433 days ago
I've always had way too much math under my belt which helps a lot and have taught myself a lot of genuine computer science out of personal interest. I actually did Andrew Ng's Coursera machine learning class all the way through as a first introduction to that field before realizing it wasn't so mysterious and was just the application of a lot of math I already knew, then ran through a bunch of tensor flow tutorials when that first came out and the like. Then just experimented on my own. I have a knack for data though.

Formally from school, I've only had 3 semesters of scientific programming in Fortran and a shitload of math. That and years and years of building models and massaging data in Excel.

Mostly I'm just really used to learning a new API/tool and applying it to new things.

A lot of the ML stuff hasn't been fancy ML, just basic things but applied in really clever and novel ways.

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codesushi42 2433 days ago
Study stats and convex optimization. If you understand logistic regression and MLE, you're mostly there.
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