alice

I worked in an R&D lab (IBM) for a year during undergraduate, on several internal research projects. Although the work you do there may be **very** interesting, they move much slower in terms of getting published. My impression was that they simply do not care. They wanted, most of all, to have the fancy optimization in their compiler. Then, maybe in a year, apply for the patent. Then God knows when, write the paper. I still think MS/PhD are better options. Although I would love to hear about research positions that do not require grad school.

I can't give a qualified answer, but if you didn't get a bad letter, you probably still have a chance. They give higher priority to students who applied directly to MS. Having said that, hope =). It's not over until it's over.

There are 3 from Toronto. So it's a fair number

I just submitted a paper to IJCAI/AAAI 2009. If you look at the program committee (http://ijcai-09.org/program_committee.html), there are 3 people from CMU, 3 from MIT, and no-one from Berkeley. I know it's not a perfect argument, but go MIT! =)

Waterloo.

Isn't MIT the big AI school? Also I thought CMU is better for AI than Berkeley - certainly if you want to do game theory or computational learning!

Hello, Does anyone know about CMU - have they released all their acceptances? Thanks

finest_engineering: I guess you must be doing networks stuff... many game theory problems are inspired from systems. Will likely do game theory in grad school - I like the game-like setting =). Simulations can help tremendously (even in a theory problem... the main insight came from there (in my case)) And I would say don't worry. Your profile is great and you will get recognized for your work, eventually by the very schools that now closed the door =) And by the way it was great to meet you guys. Although seeing results posted on this forum can help one go insane, I felt better to talk about it.

Yes, that's very true ( They don't even go to each other's conferences. At some US schools, except CMU, I applied for theory as the first choice, because I didn't see anything close to game theory done in the AI groups. Waterloo does game theory in both the CS and the C&O departments (different flavours)

Hello PCP, I worked with Kate. One of my references was from industry. Kate is indeed known for game theory/AI at CMU, probably less so at Berkeley or Stanford where I got rejected - or so I understand. I don't want to disclose more about my references, though. Are you from Waterloo??? I worked on coalitional games. I only applied to the first 4 (+ Waterloo), and I regret that decision. I should really go back to doing homework!

My paper was in game theory, and it took me a summer to do the work. I found (or came up with, depending on your philosophy) a class of games, proved several properties about them, introduced a stability measure and proved more things about it. The conference reviewers considered the result "important" and a starting point for future research. I do agree that systems projects can take longer, because I worked in compilers for a year, and it can take forever to get the damn thing working (even when you know exactly what it's supposed to do). I did the entire programming and solved problems that appeared on the way, but it was my supervisor's initiative. When we were almost done, it was running out of memory on medium size benchmarks. We added a garbage collection mechanism for our framework, that would not interfere with the rest of the compiler. There will be a paper and a patent on that work (sometime, industry research moves slower), but it was too late for me in terms of grad school admissions. Also, sadly, my supervisor there did not have ties with those schools, so maybe that's why I sounded bitter. I didn't want to imply anyone can get good letters "just because".

Okay, so one last comment. I just do not want anyone saying "I guarantee the publications are not at conferences anywhere near this calibre" or "if you aren't getting rejected, your work is probably not as innovative as it should be...". I know the weaknesses of my application, and I was not arguing someone's research is less valuable. But you are not qualified to judge my research. In fact, you do not even know me, so please refrain from such comments. I think the discussion here confirms numerous studies, that people behave much "less nicely" when anonymous.

finest_engineering was not a jerk and was not trying to put you down. My paper was accepted at THE TOP conference in the field, and I was the first author, with a prof who supervised me. So at the very least please be respectful - because you do not know the other candidates' work - and be glad you had two famous profs write letters for you.

Yeah, imagine how I feel to be rejected with first author publication at a top AI conference, and research projects in compilers. I think it must be the letters, in the sense that my recommenders are not 'well connected' at schools like Stanford, Berkeley, etc. So I'll do MS first, and then probably get rejected again by those 4 schools, for the same reason.

I'm doing MS in Canada, where it is paid. I'm really impressed that you got an interview with Berkeley despite low grades. I was told they filter on GPA/GRE first...