There will be two machine learning summer schools in 2006.
One is in Canberra, Australia from February 6 to February 17 (Aussie summer). The webpage is fully ‘live’ so you should actively consider it now.
The other is in Taipei, Taiwan from July 24 to August 4. This one is still in the planning phase, but that should be settled soon.
Attending an MLSS is probably the quickest and easiest way to bootstrap yourself into a reasonable initial understanding of the field of machine learning.