The folloing is a list of resources as well asd additional concepts that could hopefully help you out.
👨🎓 Students | 👩💻 Developers | 🔬 Researchers | 🏢 Professionals |
---|---|---|---|
Building foundational knowledge | Implementing AI solutions | Staying current with research | Understanding AI for business |
- Start with General AI & ML Foundations
- Move to Neural Networks & Deep Learning basics
- Explore Ethics & Safety considerations
- Dive into Transformers & LLMs
- Explore Generative AI techniques
- Study Multi-Modal AI applications
- Focus on cutting-edge research papers in each section
- Explore Neuro-Symbolic AI developments
- Contribute to the community by suggesting new resources
- General AI & Machine Learning Foundations
- Neural Networks & Deep Learning
- Transformers & Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Generative AI & Generative Models
- Reinforcement Learning & Decision Making
- Symbolic AI & Automated Reasoning
- Cognitive Architectures & Cognitive Modeling
- Neuro-Symbolic & Hybrid AI
- Multi-Modal AI (Vision, Language, and More)
- Explainability & Model Interpretability
- Ethics, Safety & AI Alignment
- Human-AI Interaction & Collaboration
Introductory and broad resources on AI and machine learning, suitable for building a strong foundation.
- Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents (3rd Ed., 2023) – David L. Poole & Alan K. Mackworth. Comprehensive HTML textbook covering intelligent agents, search, reasoning under uncertainty, planning, multi-agent systems, KR, and societal impacts.
- Demystifying Artificial Intelligence (2023) – Emmanuel Gillain. Concise open-access book contrasting symbolic/statistical AI and explaining core concepts and ethics.
- Unlocking Artificial Intelligence (2022) – Christopher Mutschler et al. Springer PDF on data-driven learning, uncertainty quantification, RL agents, and industrial applications.
- The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book (2019) – Andriy Burkov. 100-page ML primer, free PDF available under “read first, pay later.”
- Machine Learning Yearning (2018) – Andrew Ng. Free online guide on ML project strategy: task prioritization, error analysis, validation.
- Introduction to Statistical Learning (2nd Ed., 2021) – Gareth James et al. Free PDF textbook with R labs covering regression, classification, trees, clustering.
- Elements of Statistical Learning (2009) – Trevor Hastie et al. In-depth theory book on SVMs, boosting, neural nets, available free.
Resources on neural architectures and deep learning, from intuitive introductions to comprehensive references.
- Neural Networks and Deep Learning (2015) – Michael Nielsen. Free online book with narrative explanation, visual proofs, and code walkthroughs.
- Deep Learning (2016) – Goodfellow, Bengio & Courville. Standard deep learning textbook, free HTML/PDF on authors’ site.
- Dive into Deep Learning (2020) – Zhang et al. Jupyter-based interactive book with MXNet, PyTorch, TensorFlow examples.
- A Brief Introduction to Neural Networks (2014) – David Kriesel. PDF with hand-drawn illustrations explaining perceptrons, backprop.
- Neural Networks (2023) – Dhaliwal, Lepage-Richer & Suchman. OAPEN book exploring neural nets’ history, culture, and societal impact.
- Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch (2020) – Howard & Gugger. Fast.ai’s free online book teaching practical DL via high-level API.
- Deep Learning with PyTorch (2020) – Stevens, Antiga & Viehmann. GitHub repo for free download of PyTorch tutorial book.
Key papers and surveys on attention, transformer architectures, and modern LLM training techniques.
- Attention Is All You Need (2017) – Vaswani et al. Introduced the Transformer, revolutionizing sequence modeling with self-attention.
- BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (2018) – Devlin et al. Bidirectional masked LM and next-sentence prediction.
- Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020) – Brown et al. GPT-3 paper showing few-shot prompting capabilities.
- Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback (2022) – Ouyang et al. InstructGPT/RLHF method to align LMs to user intent.
- Foundations of Large Language Models (2023) – Tong Xiao & Jingbo Zhu. Comprehensive survey of LLM pre-training, scaling, fine-tuning.
- A Survey of Large Language Models (2023) – Zhao et al. RUCAIBox overview of GPT, PaLM, LLaMA, and evaluation methods.
- GPT-4 Technical Report (2023) – OpenAI. Official GPT-4 capabilities and limitations.
- Sparks of AGI: Early Experiments with GPT-4 (2023) – Bubeck et al. Empirical evaluation of GPT-4’s general intelligence.
- LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models (2023) – Touvron et al. Meta’s scaled-down LLMs with competitive performance.
- BLOOM Language Model (2022) – BigScience. 176B open-source multilingual LLM.
Seminal papers on GANs, VAEs, diffusion models, and state-of-the-art generative techniques.
- Generative Adversarial Networks (2014) – Goodfellow et al. Original GAN formulation as minimax game.
- CycleGAN: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation (2017) – Zhu et al. GANs for style transfer without paired data.
- Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes (2013) – Kingma & Welling. Original VAE paper.
- Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (2020) – Ho et al. Diffusion-based generative modeling.
- Latent Diffusion Models (2022) – Rombach et al. Stable Diffusion’s latent-space approach.
- Imagen & DALL·E 2 (2022) – Google Brain & OpenAI. Reports on advanced text-to-image methods.
- Prompting Techniques Survey (2021) – Liu et al. Systematic review of prompting methods in NLP.
- OpenAI Jukebox (2020) – Music generation with transformers.
- AudioLM (2022) – Token-based audio generation.
Core RL textbooks, landmark papers, and modern advancements.
- Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2nd Ed., 2018) – Sutton & Barto. Definitive RL textbook, free PDF.
- Algorithms for Decision-Making (2022) – Kochenderfer et al. Decision theory, planning, bandits, and RL.
- AlphaZero (2017) – Silver et al. Self-play RL with MCTS for Chess/Shogi/Go.
- OpenAI Gym (2016) – Toolkit and example environments.
- Planning Algorithms (2006) – LaValle. Motion and discrete planning.
- STRIPS (1971) – Fikes & Nilsson. Original planning representation.
Logic-based AI, knowledge representation, classical search, and symbolic planning.
- Symbolic AI Overview: A Beginner’s Guide to Symbolic Reasoning & Deep Learning (2019) – Artirm Gubaidullin. Contrasts rule-based symbolic systems (expert systems, logic programming) with data-driven deep learning; explains when explicit rules excel in interpretability and low-data regimes.
- Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (2004) – Stanford CS227 Notes – Brachman & Levesque (textbook); these lecture notes cover logic, semantic networks, frames, description logics, and automated inference.
- Learn Prolog Now! – Bruynooghe et al. Free online Prolog tutorial teaching facts, rules, and queries—hands-on introduction to first-order logic programming.
- A* Search Algorithm (1968) – Hart, Nilsson & Raphael. Wikipedia summary of the original A* pathfinding algorithm, complete with pseudocode and complexity analysis.
- Alpha–Beta Pruning (1975) – Knuth & Moore. Wikipedia overview of minimax search optimization used in game-playing AI.
- STRIPS Planner (1971) – Fikes & Nilsson. Original Stanford Research Institute memo defining actions via preconditions/effects—foundation of classical planning.
- OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Overview (2009) – W3C specification for building and querying knowledge graphs and ontologies on the Semantic Web.
Integrated architectures modeling human cognition: memory, reasoning, learning, and consciousness.
- Extending the Soar Cognitive Architecture (2008) – John Laird. Core paper describing Soar’s production-rule memory, working-memory decision cycle, and chunking learning mechanism.
- ACT-R: How ACT-R Works – John R. Anderson. Official ACT-R website with free manual and papers on modules for declarative/procedural memory, visual/motor systems, and timing models of human cognition.
- 40 Years of Cognitive Architectures (2020) – Kotseruba & Tsotsos. Survey of 84 architectures (symbolic, connectionist, hybrid), mapping core cognitive abilities and real-world applications.
- Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents (2024) – Sumers et al. TMLR paper introducing CoALA: integrating large language models with production-system memories and decision procedures.
- LEIA: Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents (2023) – McShane et al. MIT Press open-access work presenting hybrid symbolic + data-driven agents designed for transparency, tool use, and human-AI collaboration.
- Human and Machine Consciousness (2017) – David Gamez. Open Book Publishers free text exploring theories of consciousness in biological and artificial systems.
Bridging neural networks with symbolic reasoning for robust, explainable systems.
- Neuro-Symbolic AI: A Survey (2023) – Garcez et al. CACM survey of neural-symbolic frameworks (Neural Theorem Provers, DeepProbLog, Logic Tensor Networks).
- Towards Cognitive AI Systems: A Neuro-Symbolic Survey (2024) – Hao et al. ArXiv taxonomy of integration strategies (Neuro→Symbolic, Symbolic→Neuro, fully integrated loops) for trustworthy AI.
- Logical Neural Networks (2020) – Riegel et al. Differentiable logic operators embedded in neural architectures, enabling exact Boolean reasoning in the limit.
- Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner (2019) – Mao et al. NS-CL system combining neural perception with symbolic program induction for CLEVR visual question answering.
- IBM Neurologic AI Workshop (2020) – IBM Research slides and videos on prototype neuro-symbolic systems by Gary Marcus, Josh Tenenbaum, and others.
- Neural LP: Learning to Reason with Logic Programming (2017) – Yang et al. Neural methods for learning logical rules over knowledge graphs.
- Neuro-Symbolic Integration for Knowledge Graphs (2022) – Survey on combining graph neural networks with symbolic reasoning over ontologies.
Models that jointly process text, images, audio, and other modalities.
- Multimodal Foundation Models: From Specialists to General-Purpose Assistants (2023) – Li et al. ArXiv survey tracing the evolution from single-task models (captioning) to unified multimodal LLM assistants.
- CLIP (2021) – Radford et al. Contrastive pre-training on 400 M image–text pairs enabling zero-shot vision tasks via text prompts.
- ALIGN (2021) – Jia et al. Google’s large-scale image–text contrastive model on 1 B+ pairs.
- BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training (2022) – Li et al. Unified framework for vision–language tasks using noisy image–text data.
- FLAVA (2022) – Singh et al. Facebook’s foundational model covering vision, language, and their fusion.
- SimVLM (2021) – Wang et al. Simple Visual Language Model pre-training with weak supervision for captioning and VQA.
- Mind’s Eye: Vision-Language Navigation (2020) – Hao et al. Survey on agents interpreting language instructions to navigate 3D environments.
- A Survey on Multimodal LLMs (2023) – Zhang et al. Overview of extending LLMs with image, audio, and video modalities.
- Programming Computer Vision with Python (2012) – Jan Erik Solem. Free O’Reilly-style book on image processing with PIL and OpenCV.
- CVPR 2023 Tutorials – Official CVPR page listing tutorials on vision foundation models.
- NeurIPS 2022 Tutorials – NeurIPS schedule page for multimodal and foundational model tutorials.
Techniques and critiques for making AI models transparent and understandable.
- Interpretable Machine Learning (2019) – Christoph Molnar. Free guide covering feature importance, decision trees, LIME, SHAP, saliency maps, and best practices.
- Attention Is Not Explanation (2019) – Jain & Wallace. Shows that attention weights in NLP models may not correspond to model reasoning.
- The Building Blocks of Interpretability (2018) – Olah et al. Interactive Distill.pub article visualizing internal neuron activations and circuits in CNNs.
- SHAP: SHapley Additive exPlanations (2017) – Lundberg & Lee. Game-theoretic framework for local feature attributions.
- TCAV: Testing with Concept Activation Vectors (2018) – Kim et al. Probes whether high-level human concepts influence network predictions.
- Ethical Artificial Intelligence (2014) – Bill Hibbard. Examines reward hacking, model-based utility, and transparency in agent design.
- Model Cards (2019) – Mitchell et al. FAT* paper on concise documentation of model performance, intended use, and limitations.
- Datasheets for Datasets (2018) – Gebru et al. Proposes standardized documentation for dataset provenance and characteristics.
Understanding and mitigating ethical risks, fairness concerns, and alignment challenges.
- Ethical Artificial Intelligence (2014) – Bill Hibbard. Free book-length arXiv treatment of utility-based agents, reward corruption, and instrumental goals.
- Concrete Problems in AI Safety (2016) – Amodei et al. OpenAI paper outlining side-effects, reward hacking, oversight, safe exploration, and robustness.
- A Tutorial on Fairness in ML (2022) – Nargesian et al. Survey of fairness definitions, bias mitigation, and case studies.
- Fairness and Machine Learning (2019) – Barocas, Hardt & Narayanan. Free draft book on social, legal, and technical aspects of algorithmic bias.
- The Alignment Problem (2020) – Brian Christian. Companion site with summaries and interviews on AI alignment issues.
- IEEE Ethically Aligned Design (2019) – Multi-author PDF report with guidelines on accountability, privacy, and autonomous systems.
- ACM FAccT Conference Proceedings – Annual open proceedings on fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems.
- Stanford “Ethics of AI” Course – Syllabus and readings from Stanford’s AI ethics classes.
- OpenAI Safety Blog – Posts on concrete safety experiments and alignment research.
- DeepMind Safety Blog – Articles on scalable approaches to aligning advanced agents.
- AI Now Institute Reports – Annual free reports on AI’s societal impacts and policy recommendations.
- Stanford HAI AI Index – Yearly index tracking AI development, adoption, and governance trends.
Design practices and studies for effective, trustworthy human–AI partnerships.
- Guidelines for Human–AI Interaction (2019) – Amershi et al. CHI paper with 18 design guidelines; includes Microsoft’s HAX Toolkit and card deck.
- Human-Centered AI Framework (2020) – Ben Shneiderman. Proposes “supertools” and “centaurs” that balance high automation with human control.
- UX Guidebook for AI Products – Google PAIR’s free guide on data visualization, recommendations, and trust-design patterns.
- Explainable AI for Designers – Microsoft AI UX Cookbook section outlining explanation types and use cases.
- Teamwork Between Humans and AI (2016) – Kamar. AAAI paper on mixed-initiative systems and centaur teams.
- Doctors and AI: Trust in ML Diagnostics (2021) – CHI study on how explanation style influences clinician trust.
- Effects of Chatbot Personification (2017) – Examines how giving chatbots personalities affects user engagement and trust.
- Human-in-the-Loop ML – Blog and resources on active learning, annotation interfaces, and continual improvement.
- LabelStudio Documentation – Open-source tool guides for designing effective data-labeling workflows.
Tool | Description | Best For |
---|---|---|
PyTorch | Dynamic neural network framework | Research, prototyping |
TensorFlow | Production-ready ML platform | Deployment, scaling |
JAX | NumPy-compatible ML library | High-performance computing |
Hugging Face | Pre-trained models hub | NLP, multimodal tasks |
- 🔗 Google Colab - Free GPU/TPU access
- 📊 Kaggle Kernels - Competition-ready notebooks
- 🏠 Jupyter Lab - Local development environment
- ☁️ Gradient - Cloud-based ML workspace
📅 Detailed Timeline
Month 1-2: Foundations
- Complete "AI: Foundations of Computational Agents" (Chapters 1-5)
- Watch 3Blue1Brown Neural Network series
- Learn Python basics if needed
Month 3-4: Machine Learning
- Study "Introduction to Statistical Learning"
- Complete Andrew Ng's ML course exercises
- Build first ML project (iris classification)
Month 5-6: Deep Learning
- Work through "Neural Networks and Deep Learning"
- Implement neural network from scratch
- Choose specialization area
Track | Duration | Key Resources | Projects |
---|---|---|---|
🔤 NLP Specialist | 3-4 months | Transformers, BERT papers | Chatbot, text classifier |
👁️ Computer Vision | 3-4 months | CNN papers, OpenCV guide | Image classifier, object detection |
🎮 Reinforcement Learning | 4-5 months | Sutton & Barto book | Game AI, robot control |
🔗 MLOps Engineer | 2-3 months | Deployment guides | Model serving, monitoring |
- 📖 Active Reading: Take notes and implement code examples
- 🛠️ Project-Based Learning: Build something with each new concept
- 👥 Community Engagement: Join Discord servers and forums
- 📝 Teaching Others: Write blog posts or explain concepts
- 🔄 Spaced Repetition: Review concepts at increasing intervals
- ❌ Jumping to advanced topics too quickly
- ❌ Only reading without implementing
- ❌ Ignoring mathematical foundations
- ❌ Not practicing on real datasets
- ❌ Comparing your progress to experts
- 🔴 r/MachineLearning - Research discussions
- 💙 r/LearnMachineLearning - Beginner-friendly
- 🐦 AI Twitter - Latest updates
- 💬 Hugging Face Discord - NLP community
- 3Blue1Brown - Mathematical intuition
- Two Minute Papers - Research summaries
- AI Explained - Technical deep dives
- Yannic Kilcher - Paper reviews
🤔 "I'm completely new to programming. Where should I start?"
Start with Python basics first:
- Python for Everybody - Free course by Dr. Chuck
- Automate the Boring Stuff - Practical Python
- Then move to AI foundations in this compendium
📚 "How much math do I need to know?"
Essential Math Topics:
- Linear Algebra: Vectors, matrices, eigenvalues
- Calculus: Derivatives (for backpropagation)
- Statistics: Probability, distributions, hypothesis testing
- Discrete Math: Logic, set theory (for symbolic AI)
Great Resources:
- Khan Academy - All math topics
- 3Blue1Brown Essence Series - Visual linear algebra
💼 "Which AI career path should I choose?"
Career Paths by Interest:
- Love Research? → AI Researcher / PhD track
- Want to Build Products? → ML Engineer / AI Product Manager
- Enjoy Data Analysis? → Data Scientist / AI Analyst
- Like Infrastructure? → MLOps Engineer / AI Platform Engineer
- Interested in Ethics? → AI Safety Researcher / AI Policy Specialist
⏱️ "How long does it take to become job-ready?"
Realistic Timelines:
- Career Switcher (Full-time study): 6-12 months
- Student (Part-time): 1-2 years
- Working Professional (Weekends): 1.5-3 years
- PhD Research Track: 4-7 years
Month 1-3: Foundations
├── Python programming
├── Statistics & linear algebra
└── Basic ML algorithms
Month 4-6: Deep Learning
├── Neural networks
├── PyTorch/TensorFlow
└── Computer vision OR NLP specialization
Month 7-9: Production Skills
├── MLOps (Docker, Kubernetes)
├── Model deployment
└── System design
Month 10-12: Portfolio & Job Search
├── 3-5 strong projects
├── Open source contributions
└── Technical interviews prep
Year 1: Strong Foundations
├── Advanced mathematics
├── Classical ML theory
└── Programming proficiency
Year 2: Research Skills
├── Paper reading & writing
├── Research methodology
└── Conference presentations
Year 3-4: Specialization
├── Choose research area
├── PhD or industry research
└── Publication record
Conference | Focus Area | When | Location |
---|---|---|---|
NeurIPS | General ML/AI | December | Rotating |
ICML | Machine Learning | July | Rotating |
ICLR | Learning Representations | May | Rotating |
AAAI | Artificial Intelligence | February | USA |
ACL | Natural Language Processing | Summer | Rotating |
CVPR | Computer Vision | June | USA |
- AI/ML Meetups - Local networking
- Papers We Love - Academic paper discussions
- Kaggle Days - Data science competitions
- PyTorch DevCon - Framework-specific events
⭐ If this compendium helped you on your AI journey, please consider giving it a star! ⭐
Made with ❤️ by the AI community, for the AI community