One guy who (apparently) successfully does it is Joseph Turian [1]. He is on HN [2] and quora. The reason I think you may have a hard time finding work is tha

One guy who (apparently) successfully does it is Joseph Turian [1]. He is on HN [2] and quora. The reason I think you may have a hard time finding work is that, in my experience, and I believe this to be a widely help opinion, you get far more out of careful feature selection, cleaning, and filtering; and careful hand tooling of algorithms to your domain than out of your raw ML tech. This has been my experience at two companies (no names since there are tools on HN who like to make posts out to be representative of the company, but if you want I'm happy to discuss over email.) The problem then, for you, is that this augurs poorly for hiring external consultants because the hard part is domain specific knowledge and you don't want that to walk out the door. To the extent that people want help setting up common toolkits like R, lucene, elastic search, weka, mahout, vowpal rabbit, etc, there could be lucrative work. I'm actually pretty curious about this myself. In fact, if you want to discuss offline, drop me an email. Good luck. [1] http://metaoptimize.com/blog/ http://metaoptimize.com/blog/ [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bravura http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bravura