edvolkov

Also add UIUC. In fact, I'm not too familiar with masters admissions. But if you applied to PhD, I woulds say that you have very good shot at UMich, Purdue, Wisc, UMCP. And pretty good chances to get into UTexas, Gatech, CMU or UIUC. As far as I know, UIUC funds masters students.

I'm not sure if conferences you listed are good in security. But anyway, drop UCLA, Toronto - they are nothing in security. Add CMU, Gatech

In Yale they admit something like 7 people per year in CS - they have very small CS department. Also Russian schools except MIPT, MSU and SpbSu are totally not known to the admission commitee. You can PM me, so we can speak in Russian.

UTSA gained positions in security just recently. They built new cybersecurity center in 2007, invited some great profs (including Ravi Sandhu - the greatest one in area of access control). Also San-Antonio is considered as future capital of cybersecurity.

As for security field of research (excluding cryptography) I can recommend you the following universities that are outside of top-20 or on 20-th place: UCSB (but their security group is extremely strong and it's very hard into it), Purdue (these guys don't like to give funding for incoming students), WashU, UC Irvine, Stony Brook, UNC, Rice, JHU. All these universities have strong research in the security area and they are stronger that some from top-10 such as MIT, Princeton or Cornell. Also there are some universities with very low ranking, but with strong security groups. For example UTSA or Northeastern.

OK, I don't put in doubt that there is a trend. I have the same point of view on academic placement. While there is a very huge gap between several (5-7) top schools and others, the difference between other schools (up to top-50 I guess) is very slight. Btw - there is statistics for alumni since 1995. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~estan/alumnistatistics/top25/AlumniAA_matrix.html

But this statistics is too old I guess - there are several mistakes.

It's a bit exaggerated to say "were able". They "are able" to get position at school with similar or lower rank. But getting position at top-10 will be very difficult even for people from schools that are outside of top-10, but inside top-15. In UCB there are only 12% percents of professors from non top-10 schools. And half of these profs are from schools outside of top-20. If we will take something more lower-ranked from top-10 like UT Austin, there are 19% percents of profs from non-top-10 schools, quarter of them are from schools outside of top-20. In Princeton there are 27 percents from non-top-10 schools and half of them received PhD outside of top-20.

It is true in your area, but not in CS. If you check up the professors in top-10 you will see that vast majority of them are having degrees from top-10 institutions.

If you want to go in academia after your graduate study, the ranking of your school is more important that your adviser or your work. But it pertains only to top-10 school. The placement of people outside of this top is pretty similar and depends on school ranking very slightly.

Yesterday I've declined offer from Rutgers. Hope this helps.

I've calculated these numbers manually by using "Publish or Perish" program. You can do it by yourself For instance, compare MIT and UCSB.

It's not a top notch program since in the toppers the average citation count per faculty member (in last ten years) is something like 4 or 5k. And in UCSB it's only 2.3 k. Also in toppers the average h- and g-index for pubs in last ten years is something like 25 and 50 correspondingly. In UCSB these numbers are 18 and 38.

UCSB is not a top notch program. But the are very strong in computer security. I think that their rise in USNews ranking (that is based on opinions) in the last years is heavily caused by increasing reputation of their seclab. Btw I'm not sure that you can get in this lab without having previous research exp in that field since all the people there are very strong in security. I don't know about any other fields. PS. I guess I know you from another forum

Eitan Grinspun, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Steve Feiner (I don't know how this set is representative). You can use "publish or perish" program to count citations.Don't use microsoft academic research to do it since it's very buggy up to this moment.

Funkhouser and Rusinkiewicz have more citations in last 10 years altogether than three Columbia profs working in vision.

95% SUNY SB. I don't care about cs ranking thing because in my subfield it is one of the toppers. Also one of the strongest prof in my area wants to see me in his lab.

I know a guy who had a first place at ACM-ICPC. And he was accepted to UCB without any publications or GRE subject. And his major was not CS (he switched to another program at Masters because of conflict with faculty)

What kind of support have you received, TA or RA?

Previously I've selected 10 years. But within 5 year period this Catholic University beats UCSB, that's really funny This site has lots of bugs as any Microsoft product. I trust only to Google scholar.

BTW I've just checked more carefully this Microsoft research site and I can say that it's ridiculous. In security research area Catholic University of Leuven that even doesn't have such research field listed on their site, shares the same place with UCSB that has one of the strongest labs with dozens of publications each year on top-notch conferences.

I disagree with it. I've just measured average h-index and g-index of 15 random faculty members (for publications since 2000). For OSU it was higher than in UNC case (by around 25 percents).

Are you sure with throwing away other universities? You now, there is a very big difference between top-10 and other universities. But the difference between top-20 (that are outside of top-10) and even top-40 is very very slight. Moreover since all the rankings are quite subjective, it can be so that low-ranked university can be better than high-ranked.

I also received admit for MS. Hope for best, since up to now they have admitted very few people (but maybe it is because of budget cuts).

Rankings are pretty similar (last year SUNY was 31 on US news rankings), faculty is similar too in terms of different indexes (h-index, g-index and several others - I've measured them). Don't know about research in Distributed Computing / Networking - you should check it by yourself (pubs at top conferences in last years, match with your interests, alumni placement) (I only know that UCSB is little stronger in security area). Funding scenario is better in UCSB (but tuition fee is higher) Cost of living is similar (both are pretty high) I think, that UCSB is better in finding job post MS since it is located in CA:) Also the climate in this area is much better than in NY:) These universities are pretty identical by your criteria. I suggest you to investigate the "research" factor and to make your decision basing on it.