@earnest, to give you some insight regarding machine learning:
For the last 5 years I've been doing similar things that @krishtopa claims to be doing and if you started to test my theoretical knowledge you would be quite disappointed. The thing is that, when you apply machine learning to practical issues, you don't need to accumulate lots of theoretical stuff - you research things that you need at a given moment, turn them into code and forget the scientific theories behind them. Or you just use tools created by people who are smarter than most of us. It's not an academia environment, it's dealing with hard-core tedious little details that matter in this business.
The girl might be fake but most probably she is not. Her answers make sense - I wouldn't give you better ones. So you might say that I'm a poser as well.