US PhD from Australian undergrad (Profile evaluation)

[karilex]

Hey everyone, I've recently graduated from a top university in Australia and I'd like to get a PhD in Machine Learning at a top US (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, UW) or UK (Cambridge) institution. I've got a decent profile:

• The Australian equivalent of a 4.0 GPA.
• Research experience in the field of security and machine learning.
• A publication in JMLR.
• Working on two papers (one in security one in ML) that will be under review for top tier conferences by the end of the year.
• University medal and multiple awards for coming first in courses.
• Good letters of recommendation from two professors in security (one with ~8k citations, the other with ~2k) and one professor in ML (much younger with ~1k citations)
• Significant internship experience as a software engineer at big tech companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon).
• Should be able to get 90th percentile scores in verbal/quantitative GRE fairly easily given practice test results.
• TA for 5 courses.

I'm curious as to what people think my odds are. I've heard that I'm at a pretty big disadvantage with respect to letters of recommendation since people in the US/UK might not have heard of some researchers in Australia. Is there anything at all I can do to improve my odds?

Also, when considering applications would committees care that a lot of my research experience hasn't been in my intended field of graduate study or is any CS research experience counted equally?

Finally, I've noticed that the CS GRE has been discontinued, would it be worth my time to take the math GRE subject test given my intended field of study or would it just be disregarded completely?

Edited March 16, 2016 by karilex