Machine learning or artificial intelligence as it might be more commonly known to people, is currently at a development height due to the following. Sufficient computational power, great high level programming environments, internet and collaboration as well as growing data requiring efficient mining techniques.
The following are some universities which are strong in this field;
- CMU (Carnegie Mellon)
- MIT
Its all about algorithms and methodology. All requiring learning samples and test sets.
Some good conferences / journals as follows:
- JMLR (Journal for Machine Learning) – http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu
- Machine Learning – http://www.springer.com/computer/artificial/journal/10994
- IEEE Pattern Recognition & Machine Intelligence – http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tpami/