Back story: I'm 12 years out of university now, and have developed a career contracting in Software Dev, and more recently a large amount of test automation gigs, which pays the bills but is frankly, boring.

My honours thesis and one of my final year papers in uni really piqued my machine learning interest, and I developed a neural network for drug prediction. I loved it, and topped the class in the machine learning.

I miss that. I miss the exciting edge of science, the challenge of the unknown. Sure I've had contracts where I wasn't sure a job was even possible, but that was so much more exciting.

Now with the advent of deep learning really kicking into gear, I want in.

Any thoughts? Those in the field, did you switch from academia or from commercial gigs? I'm in Australia if that helps, but have worked in 5 countries, so have never had an aversion to moving for a contract.