parasolsherry

UW： Mar 8-9 UMICH: somewhere around Mar 17 Gatech: Mar 3-5

My pleasure! =) Your work will actually include pretty good research, but from what I see it's related to general machine learning or data mining in practical fields. If you've fixed your interest so specifically on vision and SLAM, You are right that it is not so related to what you want. Yes I understand the necessity of taking only funded grad programs, and I must say I agree with it. For the Columbia thing, I guess you could try, but EE and CS should have separated admission office and direct transfer at this stage while maintaining TAship in EE might not work out. Directly applying for CS MS with funding again might even be easier XDD Or you may try entering Columbia as a EE MS student, and then to take various CS courses and work with CS professors. While your degree is still in EE, as a MS student you are less committed to your program than a EE PhD, and thus could get more access to CV related things! This will also help with your recommendation letters. I struggled wandering around many different research fields and only the last one I tried during my whole undergrad seemed to work out. I also have difficult times when I thought I should be doing better than my peers given my efforts, while in reality nothing seemed to pay off. Things go right and wrong now and then, but there must be a way to fix it! I believe ultimately you will be rewarded (and probably outperform your peers who now hold better choices), and the time you spend on communication may also come back in a positive way sometime unexpectedly. Hold on till that moment!

Yes, applying for CS PhD with a EE-background is VERY difficult (much more difficult than applying for a CS ms), especially when you're targeting at top10. Now that AI, CV, and machine learning has become so famous, only a few CS students with very related and decent research experience would get in. I know a lot of student with accepted, first authored CVPR/ICCV papers (i.e. top conferences in CV) get rejected by a bunch of schools. So presumably convincing your POIs that your communication background proves your potential success in AI field will be unfortunately hard. I would say accepting phd offers in an area you no longer feel excited with might not be good. I started as a computer engineering student before transferring into CS, and as far as I know communication is considered far from AI, and it will be less likely for you to find perfect collaborators in this case. However you may try transferring into CS phd later. I know some of my friends did this, but it's highly risky since you are not sure if you could find a professor nice enough to take you in this way. If you are not working in the IBM research lab, I guess the job might not be as help as you would wish, but still this sounds like a better option. If you could work as a RA with some AI related professors for the next year (maybe try to talk with someone in your undergrad university), that would be best for reshaping your research background. Taking CS courses will also be very helpful as CS professors will always want people satisfying pre-req. If your ultimate goal is a PhD and you dont mind paying for next two years, you may consider make things up by applying for some more FALL 2016 CS MS program. I know Columbia, UPenn, Brown and some other schools are still accepting students. There are also programs accepting students in spring. I get that it must be very depressing now that your choices are not as shiny as your classmates' as you decide to change the field, but still finding what you like right now is not late!