NineIsPrime

I agree that the reputation and quality of the two schools are comparable. I think the most appropriate thing to do is to visit both schools and see at which one you feel more at home. Talk to the graduate students from both places and see where they seem happier. I go to Berkeley for undergrad and I LOVE the city. Of all the college towns I've been to, Berkeley is the best by a significant margin. Here's what all know about profs at Berkeley: Michael I. Jordan is a living legend in AI/ML; your future in academia is fully secure if you can become his student; but he seems already super-busy with the legion of students he has so far. Stuart Russell is probably just as renowned in AI/ML; but he is currently the department chair and thus quite busy. There's also Peter Bartlett and Martin Wainwright for ML, Jitendra Malik for vision, Dan Klein for NLP, Pieter Abbeel for Robotics, Richard Karp for Bioinformatics (he no longer does complexity theory I hear), etc. These guys are all rock-solid except for Richard Karp, no one has heard of him Beware though that the Berkeley AI Prelim is extremely hard. I think about 30% of the people pass the AI prelim and you only get 2 tries (3 if your advisor likes you a lot). So quite a bit of AI grad students never end up passing the prelim and have to change to another field or walk away with MS. On a side note, is it general consensus that CMU is better for Machine Learning than Berkeley?