You have several option for interfacing with C libraries: Cython, swig, boost-python, ctypes ...
You can find several machine learning packages mentioned at http://web.media.mit.edu/~stefie10/technical/pythonml.html, I have no experience with any of them so I can't recommend any. HTH -- Miki Tebeka <miki.teb...@gmail.com> http://pythonwise.blogspot.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list