Machine Learning in the Research Triangle

[Geococcyx]

I understand that people probably don't have strong opinions on the topic, but figured I might as well check:  who do people think is the best machine learning researcher at Duke/UNC/NC State?  They all have some excellent folks who list machine learning as a research area (e.g. Dunson/Mukherjee, Kosorok, and Laber), but plenty of them do a lot of research outside of machine learning too, and it's hard for me to separate out all of their research areas and decide how strong each subject is.  

As something of an aside, or perhaps a path to alternate answers if people just don't have any opinions on the machine learning research at these schools that they're willing to share (publicly or via DM) -- I usually look for publications in the Journal of Machine Learning Research and IEEE Transactions as a sign of good machine learning research, but are there other journals I should be considering too?

Regardless, have a great weekend everyone!

Edited April 12, 2019 by Geococcyx

[Stat Assistant Professor]

It's good to look at ML conferences as well, not just journals: ICML, NeurIPS, and AISTATS. It used to be that these conferences were far more prominent in Computer Science and not so much for Statistics. But nowadays, plenty of Statistics faculty also submit work to these top-tier conferences too.