Getting Started with AI & Machine Learning Tools ?

I have been approached by friends & Colleague on how to get started on AI & ML - including few who are beginning their entrepreneurship journey. I am making use of this platform to post few links to get started on the subject, so that it can reach more such audience!

AI is for everyone, One don't have to be Data scientist or developer to get started on AI. There are pre-built APIs to easily on-board your App with AI Capabilities. There are custom AI development tools for data scientists (e.g. Azure Machine learning workbench , azure ML Studio, Data Science VMs, Databricks (Open Source on Azure), Python & Jupyter notebook ) – which supports from drag / drop Machine learning Models capabilities to more advance deep learning libraries ( Tensorflow, pytorch , Keras , CNTK).  

Question is where should I start, Do I need to go too deep in stats, probability and Algos, to create an AI capability? It depends, you definitely need to start somewhere to get hold on the grounds. Start with Basic concepts ! Machine Learning course by Andrew NG ( Coursera) is good to get the foundation concept & Micrsoft AI School has great resources to get started in implementation mode.

What kind of infrastructure is required ? Practically, you can build simple POC & basic model on your laptop and for heavy data processing - you can choose to use high end laptop with GPU or Cloud platforms like Azure to provision Data science VM.

Which Language to use ? In my opinion, Python has been widely supported by community and you can find open code repositories in GitHub - for the similar kind of problem you are trying to solve - to gear up the process!

What do I need to install on my laptop - If I have run python code ?

• Try this - Setup Python & Jupyter Notebooks  , followed by Introduction to Python . Thanks for Talentsprint Hyderabad for making it available. This is open Source.

Azure has few offering for Developers :

• Azure Machine Learning Work bench and Azure ML Studio to help you develop your own Machine Learning Models before production deployments. Requires a sign up process here
• Data Science VM (DSVM) on azure market place with most of the data science tools including deep learning libraries - pre-installed on Machine, be it Microsoft or OSS, is made available for easy consumption.

If you want to provide Cognitive Services capabilities in the areas of Computer Vision, Speech, Search, Knowledge and Language to empower developers solve industry problems without much effort. click here to Use Microsoft API.

Disclaimer : Like you, I am also learning & stepping through my AI journey. If you find any correction in the content - please feel free to point out those. Thanks for taking time to read my first post on AI - Hope you find it useful!