Student wants a bit of direction

5 points by Jorslu 13 years ago | 4 comments

Hey,

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?

Thanks for reading. Have a nice Day/Night! xD Jorge

manish_gill 13 years ago |

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 read 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.

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.

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.

Best of luck!

Jorslu 13 years ago | |

Thank you! First time I have heard of Coursera but this site is pretty awesome.

michaelpinto 13 years ago |

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.

I did a quick casual search and found this: https://www.coursera.org/course/nlp

I would try to contact Dan and see what he thinks: http://www.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/

What's the worst that can happen? Reach out...

Jorslu 13 years ago | |

Thanks for the advice! Just to clarify a bit because I noticed that I wasn't specific enough. I want to know what I should do next, not build the next Siri so to speakI am on my phone but I will check out the links as soon as I get on my PC. Thank you Again!