Choice of Universities-Machine Learning|PhD CS|GRE:165Q 159V 4A | TOEFL:102|GPA3.69|

[finmathguy]

Hi

I'm currently applying to graduate programs to do machine learning research. I have more of a statistical background and mostly interested in statistical machine learning. Also curious on vision research.

I think I'm going to apply around 12 universities, so which universities, do you think, have strong faculties in my area of interest? I have been reading a lot on the subject, however I'm still having hard time to eliminating/adding universities to the list. Do you have any other suggestions, or do you think any of these schools are not particularly strong in statistical ml? I'd appreciate any input.

Current list: CMU, Berkeley, Toronto, Princeton, Harvard, GaTech, Cornell, Texas, Washington, UMich, UIUC, UPenn, Columbia, UCSD, UCLA, Purdue, UMCP, UMass

As for my profile

financial mathematics major from a Turkish university

3.69 GPA, graduated as first in class

strong letters

senior research project on machine learning, titled "An F-statistic Based Probabilistic Cluster Validity Index" (I'm working on a paper on the subject, haven't published it yet but I think I did a good job on the research and I have a good letter from my research advisor)

RA in the financial mathematics department (since september). Also TA of the courses Probability, Statistics, Financial Management.

GRE 164Q, 159V, 4A (91,84,48 percentile respectively)

GRE CS Subject Test - Haven't recieved the scores yet but I think my score would be around 70%

TOEFL: 29 (speaking), 24 (listening), 20 (speaking), 29 (writing), 102 total (I took TOEFL test one more time due to the low speaking score. I haven't received the results yet however I think the speaking score will be around 23-24 this time)

[finmathguy]

A minor update. Just recieved the scores of my latest TOEFL test. They are 30,29,22,29 (reading, listening,speaking, writing respectively) with a total of 110.