In the name of Allah, most gracious and most merciful,
This is a simple guide to explore which field is more suitable for you in the information age where the amount of information is overwhelming. Remove the noise and get the useful information you want.
Artificial Intelligence “AI”, Machine Learning “ML”, Data Science, Data Analysis, Data Analytics, Computational Intelligence, Natural Language Processing “NLP”, Reinforcement Learning, Computational Neuroscience, Knowledge Engineering, and the list of interesting topics goes on, and on.
In the beginning, it seems overwhelming. What are all these topics? What are their maps? How they came into existence? Who started them? and Why? How could they be useful to me and to others? The questions go on, and on. Let me share with you a possible approach for removing initial ignorance “An approach used to solve ambiguities”.
Getting an overview of the different fields
Guided by one of the Arabs learning logical principles, I will go over all of these fields and I can find other interesting fields in my way and search specifically for the following information for each of those fields: “By that, I am entering my search with a question, which will increase my retention of the information, and the probability of finding what I exactly want from the enormous amount of information on the internet”. While exploring these fields I don’t have to go over all these points since sometimes I would have already covered some of these in previous posts.
- Definition
- Topics
- Benefits
- The first one who wrote in this field, or who coined that field term
- Other possible names of the field if they exist
- Foundations upon which that science is built
- Some of the major topics or applications of the field or some of the major problems solved by the field
- Skills needed in the field (i.e. skills required to work in that field)
- Make a mind map that contains each of the previous items in this list with keywords to connect the dots and see the field more clearly
Connecting the dots “A Bigger Picture”
After building each of these maps, let us try to see if these maps can fit together in one big connected map or not. In this way, you can see if there are common skills so that if you are not sure exactly what is the most suitable field for you, you can start acquiring the common and most important skills so that if you found some clues in your way that one field is more suitable to you, you can easily go to it without losing time.
Note: I am already in the field of Natural Language Processing NLP and I already love it, but I see that there are other related and interesting fields as well. Therefore increasing my depth of knowledge in my field while increasing the breadth of knowledge in other fields is important especially in the information age we are in. Who knows what new fields will be discovered in the future?
Final Note
I hope this post is useful to you.
I would appreciate any comment on this approach, its pros, cons, and possible enhancements or suggestions. Thank you.
Allah bless our master Muhammad and his family.
