Understanding graph theory will seriously enhance your engineering skills; you must absolutely be familiar with them.
Here's a graph theory quickstart, in collaboration with Alejandro Piad Morffis.
Read on:
You don’t need a PhD to do machine learning research.
Here is the 5-bullet story of how Kyle Kranen did it:
1. He worked as an intern on QA, UI, data science during high school
2. He started doing data science and machine learning research in college 👇🏼