[pjungwir]

I think Python has become a de-facto standard language for machine learning (not necessarily academic AI research). The book Collective Intelligence by O'Reilly is a great overview of ML techniques, and it uses Python. You might also want to take the Coursera ML class. If you sign up today, you might not even miss the deadline for Week 1 coursework. (And if you do it's not that bad.) That uses Octave, not Python, but you'd still learn a lot. You might also meet like-minded people in the course forums.