TTIC, Should we count it in top-ten?

[codincodin]

Recently, I detect Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (http://www.ttic.edu/). That is actually an independent institute located in the campus of University of Chicago and solely offers Computer Science(specially AI) graduate program. They acclaim that compete(or will compete!) with top-ten universities in US as stated in their website:

With the powerful collaboration of TTIC and University of Chicago faculty, it is our joint goal to be competitive with the top ten computer science departments in the U.S.

 

Actually I didn't find nearly anything about the quality of the institute and because of their absence in all of the ranking systems it is so hard for me to evaluate them. I just found some limited information about them, for example some of their alumnus are now assistant professors in UIUC and Cornell.

 

I will be appreciate if you leave your comments about the university.Specially, do you think it is worth it to leave an offer UCSD or USC or some milder offers such as UCI and going to TTIC?

Edited June 9, 2015 by codincodin

[dat_nerd]

I haven't heard of it, and have never met anyone at an AI conference who was from TTIC. Do you have an offer from UCSD or USC? If so, I would definitely recommend taking it over a newer, lesser-known program.

[DMX]

TTIC is indeed very well regarded.

 

Probably not top 10. I'd say it is comfortably in the top 20 though.

[dat_nerd]

TTIC is indeed very well regarded.

 

Probably not top 10. I'd say it is comfortably in the top 20 though.

Really? What makes you say that?

 

Their PhD program is only 10 years old. I don't know how a program can get to be in the top 20 and have a strong presence in the academic community in just 10 years.

[marmalade_fever]

TTIC is simply excellent for AI/ML. Check out the papers accepted at NIPS, ML's biggest conference. A healthy representation from TTIC. I'd pick them over UCSD or USC for ML atleast.

[hongyuan]

Depends on who you will work with.

In general, I will say TTIC is among Top 20, instead of Top 10.

The researchers there publish a good amount of papers in top ML conferences like NIPS and ICML, and also in some top NLP conferences like ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ...

[Luptior]

Nowadays you should count on CSrankings.org for Computer Science ranking, where TTIC does show up. It does not ranked very high but take in mind that TTIC is a very small institute with only 12 faculties and focuses on AI/ML field. It's not very comparable to many big CS departments. But the academia placements is more convincing, their graduates/postdocs got placement in UIUC, Cornell... 

[Hovera]

This might be a late answer but I wanted to add that, I just realized two of our best professors in deep learning and computer vision both worked there around 2010. Afterwards they went to Virginia tech and Georgia Tech... Enough said! 

[Robbentheking]

If your interest is theoretical machine learning, TTIC is comfortably top 10. Nati Srebro and Avrim Blum have both done important work in this area, and seem like very good advisors. David McAllester is a bit of a legend in this area too, although his interest has drifted a bit recently.

It's hard to say that overall it's a top 10 department in the sense of, say, USNEWS, given that there is essentially no stuff like systems research there. But seriously, in ML, anyone with a UCSD or USC offer and a TTIC offer, as was suggested above, should absolutely take TTIC, unless there is a very specific research fit with faculty at the other schools. 

I have some inside experience with TTIC for anyone that's interested, and would be happy answer questions via pm.

[Gatech_ST]

I would like to add that If you are applying for PhD I would say the lab/professor is much more important than the actual rank of the university. Also who they collaborate with within and outside the university and where they publish.  

Edited February 20, 2020 by Gatech_ST