One thing to add: when we interview PhD's we make sure they want to be in industry. There is nothing more off putting when you talk to someone and it becomes immediately clear they much rather would've been in academia but they were not the right person at the right time.
It's more likely you'll be doing a startup after 27 then doing a PhD afterl 27. If you think you might be unhappy not having done one of them before you die, then go for the PhD first. There will be plenty of opportunities to start/join a startup later. I've done exactly that and don't regret it any bit.
PS You'll find a PhD is a great way to network with people as well.
Aforge is not even close to Infer.NET. The latter is a library to build graphical models and automatically generate deterministic inference algorithms for them. Trust me when I say there are probably less then 25 people in the world that can derive some of these inference algorithms without spending weeks studying the relevant papers (e.g. EP).
Aforge is just a collections of algorithms. It's nothing to do with building your own models. Useful nonetheless.
I don't buy it. Quantum computing is extremely important, ground breaking even for complexity theory and theoretical computer science in general. Quantum computing is to complexity theory what the real numbers are to number theory.
From a practical point of view though there are only two interesting family of algorithms: Shor's Quantum Fourier transform and Grover's square root speedup for searching an unstructured list (give or take). The former doesn't seem very applicable to machine learning (yet?). The later is AFAI am concerned useless for machine learning: if we really want to speed up searching some unordered structure then I think we will rely on sorting for a very long time to come - the advantage is much more impressive than Grover's square root speedup.
May I remind you that in the past 20 years there hasn't been much progress on "practical quantum algorithms" (that is not to say quantum complexity results). I think until something brand new comes out of the quantum computing community, these quantum claims are great PR but that's where it ends ...
