Andrew Ng's course on Machine Learning (https://www.coursera.org/course/ml https://www.coursera.org/course/ml) has rave reviews whenever I see it mentioned. It

Andrew Ng's course on Machine Learning (https://www.coursera.org/course/ml https://www.coursera.org/course/ml) has rave reviews whenever I see it mentioned. It just started again a few weeks ago and I had hoped to join this time, but other commitments made that impossible. As for the other part of your question...You may as well be asking if it's too late to research 'science'. Machine Learning may have been studied for a fair few years now, but it is still very much in its infancy. The possible developments in this area we can't yet imagine dwarfs the possible developments we can, which in turn dwarfs the 'major contributions' so far.