Deep learning has revolutionized many subfields within AI. DeepMind's AlphaGo combined convolutional neural networks together with deep reinforcement learning and MCTS, and won many games against top human Go players. In computer vision, most of the leading systems in ImageNet competitions are based on deep neural networks. Deep learning has also changed the game in NLP: for example, Google has recently replaced their phrase-based machine translation system with neural machine translation system.
Hence , I attacked the latest technology in two ways . I am taking an advanced grad course in UCSB (as a computer science grad student) " Deep Learning for NLP" and also doing a specialization in deep learning on coursera "https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning".
I will over some of the basics in neural networks, and also go through the deep learning revolution after 2006.
In the graduate class, I am working on a novel research project in open problems related to NLP and deep learning, and gaining hands-on experiences of doing cutting-edge research.