yagyu

What's your recommendation to get up to speed on current practices in machine learning for someone ~Phd-level in the hard sciences? In other words, someone experienced in linear algebra, statistics, programming, and experiment design+evaluation, but not in the specifics of machine learning.

I'm thinking courses, tutorials, blog posts, papers, books, software, instructive problem sets, etc.

I just arrived in the bay area as a postdoc (not CS) at Stanford. In spare time I enjoy dabbling with web apps and random side projects.

Where can I go to meet others and have company while hacking? Could be very casual like sitting in a cafe hacking for a while, or more organized like a user group meeting with talks. Are there any meetup lists/groups?