ssk08

Have you thought of Applying to the Adaptive Systems Lab at UCLA under Prof Ali Sayed?

Have you thought about applying for Machine Learning research in Electrical Engineering / Comp Sci Departments? Your skills set will be highly valuable to the people you apply to, since a lot of Machine Learning / Signal Processing people come from pure EECS backgrounds. Consequently, a lot of professors treat students from a slightly different field as being exotic --> Gives you a competitive advantage

As a backup you could apply to Adaptive Signal Processing research groups in the Electrical Engineering departments. The stuff you do there are pretty similar to Machine Learning/Applied Stats