fukuyama

Personally, I would choose UTA. There are two really good faculty there in my area (data mining). There actually isn't a good reason I didn't apply there to work with the IDEAL lab. I have had some contact with the professor before as a Master's student. JHU has never been on the map for me, but it might depend on the area. I would take a look at IDEAL and DML labs there. Really good faculty (personally, as well). I think it's such a personal choice, and there are a lot more important factors to consider than ranking. I dont think the exact ranking matters much, but it is important to be in at least the second tier schools (i.e. top-100 in US). In top conferences you'll be interacting with people mostly from these places. As for myself, there isn't anyone I follow at an MIT or Berkeley, so those rankings are meaningless.

Students can definitely get internships anywhere at UIUC. It is one of the top-ranked schools and several of the professors there are the absolute best in their area. I am presently at UIC which is a much lower ranked school although I have visited UIUC for different events (I am re-doing my admissions this year for personal matters that aren't relevant); I came to UIC to work with a specific faculty, and I am really happy with that decision (I had 4 admissions last cycle, a few at much better ranked universities). This summer I've arranged an internship at a top research firm in Palo Alto, and had internship offers at ORNL, and MIT. A lot of things will come down to networking and building relationships, if you are at either school. So, a lot of it will come down to match, and personal factors. If I had someone in mind, I would choose UCSC. I've forwarded this from my colleague at UMN which summarizes some factors that many students don't consider: http://www.theclimatecode.com/2013/02/a-phd-is-like-haute-couture-its.html .

You should try. They won't retract an offer. They will grant an extension or say they can't. It depends on the department.

OhMySocks: Have you made your decision? I see RPI is on your list. Yours might be the spot I'm waiting on, if you could inform them!

OGTuring: Did you, or do you plan to accept at USC? I still haven't heard anything there (but I'd like to ASAP, if you're planning to decline ). I have an M.S., University of Minnesota, 2 first-author publications (one top-tier workshop paper) 3 other publications, average GPA. UCR is actually my global #1 choice. But that's only because of my very specific area in data mining.

You have five good choices. I think the choice of school isn't as relevant as factors such as faculty pairing, and lab environment. My colleague has a really good post here: http://www.theclimatecode.com/2013/02/a-phd-is-like-haute-couture-its.html . I think the best (if you can manage) is to visit the labs you are interested in with these things in mind, or even email some of the senior PhD students to get a sense. All of them are within the top quarter of universities in terms of rankings so your opportunities won't much depend on 'name' recognition. In any case, places such as MSR or Google Research are less focused on pedigree than in tenured academic positions. You'll find several people in Machine learning and data mining coming into these places with Hong Kong, Greece, Singapore PhDs, or from lower-ranking universities in the U.S. and Canada. Another note of advice is that in choosing an advisor you should keep in mind that your advisor does not dedicate themselves to your goals. At best the advisor relationship is mutually productive, but (especially with 'superstars') it can be somewhat predatory; having a strong idea what you want to do and what resources you need to do it will save you months or even years of 'working for' your advisor, and being pushed out with a lackluster publication record because of expected PhD timelines. I'd contact three or so faculty at each of these schools, looking for a match. Also consider that redundancy is a good factor. My M.S. was at Minnesota, where there are a good selection of data mining faculty (5, solidly). People switch advisors if things dont work out, and being at a university which is an island of you and your advisor is a precarious situation.

Other than CMU, I have not received a response from other schools. From my list, UCR and SFU have not had much activity (UCR sent out their fellowship admits, and SFU: ? ), USC and RPI I am writing off (lower priority anyway). Are others still waiting on schools which haven't had much activity in the admission results?

This isn't a very precise question. I would say most large CS departments have an intersection with classified research. There are government labs (Oak Ridge National Labs), government-funded university labs (MIT Lincoln Labs) and there are projects which either have clearance or citizenship requirements (or both) which either restrict from on-site visits (i.e. even some non-citizen PIs can't see the end implementation on-site) or faculty and students who work on the project (DARPA has a lot of these). My undergraduate and master's university (Minnesota) had relationships with all of these. In my area (data mining), clearance might open a few doors at ORNL, but I dont think it's a driving motivation or advantage. As a U.S. citizen grad student, I have been approached by at least three faculty who want to write a DARPA proposal with me because I meet this requirement. With clearance, the solicitations might be more.

I was in the rejection batch for CS. Still hoping on the ML program. CMU CS is my second choice overall, and my experience and letters would be more specialized to ML.

As I understand it, in CS rankings are not reliable at all, for a start because most use journal articles (and surveys) to measure impact, while CS is very much conference-driven. Depending on what you're looking to do (i.e. an academic position) there are 'top' universities that help here as long as your record is also productive. But many people from middle-tier universities still get professorship positions. H-index by department isn't a terrible measure of activity within a research area. Microsoft Academic (http://academic.research.microsoft.com/) tracks this, and for my area of Data Mining it's a very plausible ranking (http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=7&topdomainid=2&subdomainid=7&last=10&orderby=1). For my area, the traditional top-ranked schools aren't much use (MIT, Berkeley, etc). I think far more important is finding the right advisor. I've seen people struggle for years with a poor fit of an advisor and it's a disaster: you dont get to work on what you want, you aren't developing your skills as well as you should, you probably aren't enjoying your work, and you probably aren't publishing at the level you want. I'd much rather be at a lower ranked school with a supportive advisor.

I've seen a number of acceptances posted on CMU. I had a good interview with a faculty prior to applying and have letters from collaborators with this faculty. I haven't heard anything from them. Does anyone know about the process? Is there a second round or more decisions over the next few days? I have applied to CS, and Machine Learning. Really disappointed about this so far.

Hi everyone, I am interested in neighborhoods which are within biking distance from UIC. I know the busses and trains are easy to use, I just feel more comfortable on bike (but being on the blue line as backup would be nice). I come from Minneapolis, and I gather that there aren't really any houses within miles of campus, it all seems like brownstones, or new-ish generic apartment slabs. For anyone familiar with Minneapolis, I currently live in the Seward neighborhood, and would be interested in a similar quiet urban neighborhoods in Chicago, if that exists. Seems like you need to go out to Oak Park? Is out there really 'suburban'?

I'm still waiting to work something out at EPFL. I was intending to go to IDIAP but things are a bit difficult there. Trying to get an interview in LBCC (anyone received a reply from them?). The trouble for me is many faculty at EPFL have very different interests (i.e. networks, systems), so I only have a few choices for my background (data mining, machine learning, bioinformatics). Anyone also looked at ETHZ? I think I would prefer ETH, and there are more faculty I am familiar with there. We'll see.

I am a student completing my M.S. at the University of Minnesota and have had an research assistantship there for nearly three years. My background is in data mining of time series data, and geosocial/social network analysis. I have standing offers from University of Illinois-Chicago under a professor (some weak anonymization for the sake of search terms) who works in modeling of dynamic networks, esp. non-human animal communities and EPFL in Switzerland under a professor there who has recently published a mobile phone dataset collected longitudinally in Switzerland. The former has a background in theory, and is very method-focused, while the latter has a background in computer vision and more core machine learning and is much more application-focused (i.e. "computational social science" they like to call it). I am not giving much weight to rankings per-se, first of all many rankings are based on journal publications, while computer science is by far driven by conference publications. But as someone with a background in data mining, myself and my peers are much more familiar with the work at UIC. I was drawn to EPFL because of this mobile data project in Lausanne. The researcher at EPFL is still well-cited, is invited for keynotes and these kinds of things in ubicomp, and collaborates with people like Pentland at MIT. I also prefer EPFL in most aspects: pay, lab facilities, environment, weather. On other aspects, both places seem strong: I really like the working relationship both faculty have with their students. (As someone from Minneapolis) I've always had a strong prejudice against Chicago, and looking for apartments there is very disappointing, personally. My primary question is: What should be my expectations that my advisor and university should provide, and what should be strictly on me? I mean that, if I have reservations because the faculty at EPFL doesn't publish in conferences I'm used to, should it be my responsibility to strive for these conferences? Second, I would prefer my PhD be more methods-oriented because these are the types of works I most admire in data mining and machine learning. Is it more difficult to pursue this with someone who does not have a strong background in theory? I mean that, both these faculty are mature computer scientists; I feel they both would be able to oversee a wide range related to machine learning. Thank you