"Anyone can transition to ML". I would not have believed this statement in 2019, but I strongly believe that now, me being the living proof.
In 2019, I had very little knowledge about ML. I was in the 2nd year of my PhD at MIT's mechanical engineering department.
I wanted to incorporate ML as part of my career but did not know how.
Since I was a core experimentalist, I had a few constraints.
▇ I did not like black-box ML models. It took away mechanistic understanding from my work.
▇ I did not want to immediately shift away from my core domain - mechanical engineering
▇ I wanted to incorporate ML into my work because some experimental parameters were incredibly hard to measure, and I knew that with the amount of data I had, ML would be useful
▇ I wanted to do research-level problems with ML right from the start, not toy Kaggle projects because I knew that they would not add much value to me if I wanted to do anything serious in ML
▇ In general, I like Science, Math and ML, not just ML alone
▇ Still I had no idea where to start
Luckily, at the same time, I got exposed to the Scientific ML ecosystem at MIT, thanks to Dr. Raj Abhijit Dandekar.
SciML allows you to combine the mechanistic understanding of phenomenological models and the accuracy of Neural Networks into one single problem.
♝ Neural networks alone are poorly interpretable.
♝ Mechanistic models alone are not accurate for complex models.
SciML solves this exact issue.
At Vizuara AI Labs, we have now published various papers in the domain of SciML (including at NeurIPS workshops) and it is one of the best stepping stones for anyone who wishes to transition to AI/ML.
ML is becoming increasingly democratized. You don't need a formal CS degree to have a career in ML with your domain expertise. Consider my case.
✰ I had no background in formal CS
✰ I did not take DSA courses at IITM or MIT
✰ I did not take any CS courses at IITM
✰ I was a core mechanical engineer
If you are interested in figuring out how can you transition to ML confidently as a complete beginner from any field (mech, civil, electrical, bio, etc.), join this 1-hour free webinar organized by me this Wednesday. I will share my personal story and the exact steps you can follow:
See you soon!