I don't know who any of these people are. I am assuming they are all at the top of their field. Can you recommend some blogs or new sites geared specifically to AI news that you follow. Its a subject I am interested in. Thanks.
If you are really new to AI and want a broad understanding of the topic, I really recommend this book as a quick read: "Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know" by Jerry Kaplan
How about a book for a more technical, practical introduction?
I'm (hopefully) just starting a new position where some of the team is using machine learning techniques in an applied sense (i.e. it's not a CS position, they're not researching new methods, just applying existing ones). I'd like to get a good overview of common mistakes, pitfalls, etc. to look out for from a newcomer's perspective. I have used neural networks naively and briefly in a project about 6 years ago, but I know a lot(!) has changed since then.
A fair amount. I had a lot of math courses in university, quite a bit more than I needed for quantum mechanics and that sort of thing. But I'm also by no means a mathematician, and I'm definitely out of practice.
If your comfortable with calculus and linear algebra, then that is plenty to get started. Bonus points if you know probability.
Plenty of top universities put their ML material online, so I would pick your favorite and check it out. My school teaches roughly based on the Bishop book (I think he keeps a free pdf online). It's dense reading but has information on a huge array of topics. Someone else may be able to suggest other books that are a little more focused.
Really though, I would just pick a school, look at their course website, get their textbook, and work through the posted material at whatever pace you feel provides the value you are looking for.
Hinton, Bengio and LeCun are the most well known deep learning researchers. They wrote an introductory paper about deep learning for Nature and they also gave a talk at NIPS last year. That would be a good place to start I think.
There are not many blogs out there about the topic as far as I know, but I can recommend Chris Olah's blog.
