A math student here. Know pretty much nothing about machine learning whatsoever. My intentions are to get enough knowledge and experience to be able to actually apply it usefully and not just make image OCRs. How many months am I looking at to be able solve an arbitrary problem(which of couse includes data cleaning which I assume comes with experience) irl? How many years before I can start putting my hands on ongoing problems the field faces? What reading material should I refer to, which is ideally theoretically oriented and gives enough space to explore things yourself? Any online course I should look at? Any compilation of ongoing open problems with brief overviews? Essential topics I cannot skip? I know about the open source CS degree on github, the odin project for web development, is there something similar for machine learning?
And lastly as a bonus, how much experience needed to create the perfect waifu :)