Thx for responses
Firstly, I might be able to get a recommendation from professor, instead of postdoc.
Secondly, I have been communicating with professors from some schools. Got quite positive responses from UMinn and USC and somewhat neutral responses from Michingan and UT Austin. We'll see how it goes further, I will post the news.
TOEFL Score just came in: 112.
Also I forgot to mention recommendations. One will be my from my supervisor, manager of known research center belonging to university, co-supervisor of my thesis, PhD. One will be from a group leader of corporate research center where I did my thesis, also a co-supervisor, PhD. One from the supervisor of my student project, PhD, currently a PostDoc at CMU.
I want to apply to a school in US for a PhD in Machine Learning / Data Mining. Please give me some suggestion on a schools I should apply to. My profile follows.
Graduated from mid-ranked university in Germany with major Comp. Science. German system grading and academic ranks is a bit different, but you can say that I have a M. Sc. with a GPA of 3.2
GRE: Quant 780, Verb 580, AW 3.0
TOEFL: don't have a score yet but should be ok.
I did my master thesis at a research center of a large multinational corporation. It was related to Data Mining.
Worked during my studies and a year after graduation as a research assistant at my university, however in Image Processing field.
My paper, where I'm a first author was accepted to this conference http://www.icaart.org/ . Topic is Data Mining.
I realize that my profile is probably not strong enough for Stanford or Berkeley, but here is a list of schools I am thinking about.. tell me what you think.
Berkeley
UT Austin
UPenn
UMinnesota Twin Cities
UMichigan Ann Arbor
UMass Amherst
Rennselaer Polytechnical
So, I am looking forward to responses