From software engineering to machine learning

I'd like to get into machine learning … This is something I hear often, and with good reason. Machine Learning has risen as one of the hottest fields in Computer Science and the software industry. For companies it's appealing because it serves as a tool to leverage the large volumes of data available nowadays to turn it into business value. And yet I find that many engineers don't go past the "wanting" state. I was in this state myself for a while.