I’m sure my story is somewhat familar to a lot of people here. I originally went to college for music composition. But as my program went a long, I realized this isnt the program for me. I wanted to learn music psychology, music physics, music programming, etc.. but the program was more focused on valid aspects of musicanship and being a music teacher. Nothing wrong with the school, but my mind was onto bigger things.
The Carl Sagan quote about how we live in a world ran by technology barley anyone understands influenced me to get an Assicotes in Electrial Engineering at my communitty college. My original plan was to graduate with a Bachelors in Computer Engineering with a concentration in Digital Signal Processing. Unfortunetly, my university experience was very dissapointing. I won’t get into too much detail - but looking at the quality of service I was getting vs the price I was paying per semester- It was not worth it.
What motivated me the most to switch from a DSP focus to a ML focus was Deep Mind’s Alpha Zero. This is google’s AI which taught itself how to play chess in 4 hours and beat the best chess computer at the time(Stockfish 8). When I learned about reinforcement learning and bayesian networks and markov processes.. I just wanted to keep learning about it. I loved how Fourier analysis came up again as well. Just so many things I found interesting through my academic career and on my own googling came into play in one subject matter. I had a feeling deep down that this is what I want to dedicate my life to.
One thing to mention. I came up with this cool math formula in the summer of 2016. It represents a series of ratios that when multiplied together always equal a constant. The cool thing about it is that for the x values 0 - 6.. it shows all the pythagorean ratios (notes in the music scale). I gave a tedx talk about it - but I did more work on it since then and went on to discover it’s fourier series expansion. I would love to do more with it if I can, but for now I’m ready to publish my findings. I’m looking forward to this bootcamp and can’t wait to apply what I learn!