Brown vs UCSB

[LaLena]

Today I received a mail indicating that I was accepted to MS in Computer Science at Brown. I was also admitted to UCSB and the deadline for UCSB is April 15. However I am still waiting for an answer from Johns Hopkins & USC.
I am interested in NLP, AI and data mining/text mining in general.
What would you suggest me to do ?

Thanks!

[chikachikayea]

well definetely brown over ucsb! even though the location of ucsb looks beautiful...but brown is ivy and ranked higher.

[CalmLogic]

Yeah, I agree. Congratulations on getting into Brown!

I am interested in NLP, AI and data mining/text mining in general.

All the more reason to go to Brown, as you have seen:
Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing (BLLIP)

I don't see any such lab at UCSB's website. Furthermore, Brown ranked #17 in AI in USNews in 2006. I would think the latest 2008 rankings would be similar if not better. Neither JHU, USC, or UCSB ranked in AI in 2006 as USNews only ranked the top 20.

UPDATE: However, I would wait for word from JHU since they do seem tempting:

"This will be the nation's premier language technology center, and it's likely to stimulate further expansion both at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Maryland in this important research field," Poehler said.

Headlines@Hopkins: Johns Hopkins University News Releases (June 2007)

As you have seen:
Natural Language Processing Lab home page
The Center for Language and Speech Processing at JHU

You would know better than me if JHU is better than Brown for your interests, but I would wait for JHU's decision, just to be safe, at least. Maybe they will offer you a partial tuition waiver

MSE students may be granted a tuition waiver between 10% and 50%, with 50% being alumni. MSE students are never given a stipend of any form.

JHU Department of Computer Science

or an even bigger surprise:

Applyed as MSE but accepted as PhD with full support

computer science hopkins • thegradcafe.com

I would not, however, turn down UCSB unless you already have documentation for an I-20 to pay the tuition at Brown (assuming you are an international student not eligible for U.S. student loans):

Tuition: $35,584 / year
Brown University - Engineering - Best Graduate Schools - Education - US News and World Report

Tuition: $14,988 / year

University of California--Santa Barbara - Engineering - Best Graduate Schools - Education - US News and World Report

[CalmLogic]

BTW, a few professors that look interesting:

Eugene Charniak's Home Page (Brown University)
Jason Eisner - Home Page (JHU)
http://www.isi.edu/~marcu/ (USC)

I saw them mentioned at the link page of a University of Utah NLP professor who went to USC:
Hal Daumé III - links

[LaLena]

Yes I am an international student and I am not eligible for student loans, by the way tuition for UCSB for non-residents are ~ $ 25.000.00.
I always wanted to be admitted to USC (which I applied for PhD) but there is still no response, when I call them they say that the CS admissions committee is still reviewing applications for fall 2008 admission. I am afraid that they won't be able to get an answer for me before April 15.
Perhaps JHU is better for me (because of NLP issues) compared to Brown, but Brown's ranking is higher overall, that is the reason that I am confused. And also I am not sure which one is better in NLP, USC or JHU...

Thanks for your responses.

[w_guy]

congrats on your admit to Brown. I have been also admitted for MS @ Brown. The courses and the options look really exciting and awesome.

[CalmLogic]

Have you talked to the CS admissions people at JHU recently? It can't hurt to ask for your status since they are really inconveniencing you.
I would ask if you are on a waiting list.

Perhaps JHU is better for me (because of NLP issues) compared to Brown, but Brown's ranking is higher overall, that is the reason that I am confused.

If you want to work in industry, I wouldn't be as concerned about the rankings. If you want to get a PhD later on, then I would really look carefully at their alumni pages to see where people ended up and maybe even track them down to ask their opinion However, I wasn't able, upon a cursory examination, to see a noticeable difference between the NLP alumni pages for JHU and Brown. Of course, any day now JHU should be telling you if you have been accepted or not, so they may make the decision for you.

And also I am not sure which one is better in NLP, USC or JHU...

My impression looking at the alumni pages of the NLP labs of USC, Brown, and JHU is that it is either Brown or JHU. And, unlike JHU, you don't see USC saying they are trying to be the best place in the nation for language technology. As to which may be best between Brown and JHU, I would suggest asking a professor in NLP who goes to a lot of conferences. So maybe an NLP professor at Brown, JHU, or an outside professsor/researcher would be the best judge.

[LaLena]

Yes, I spoke to JHU's admission office on Monday.
They said that my file is ready and I should get a decision by next week.
And although I am not %100 sure, I want to continue with PhD after MS.
I think I should wait JHU's decision.

[CalmLogic]

I think I should wait JHU's decision.

Yes, definitely.

BTW:

JHU.edu has more hits for NLP and IR (which may be a sign but is complicated by number of students, etc.):

site - Google Search
site:brown.edu "natural language processing" - Google Search
site:usc.edu "natural language processing" - Google Search

site:jhu.edu "information retrieval" - Google Search
site:brown.edu "information retrieval" - Google Search
site:usc.edu "information retrieval" - Google Search

(JHU has 14,275 graduate students while Brown has only 2,204.)

Brown and JHU each have some links here:
Statistical NLP / corpus-based computational linguistics resources

The links for Brown are:
Brown CS - CS241
Learning Dynamical Systems
LDC Catalog

http://nlp.cs.jhu.edu/~rflorian/fntb (dead)
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~brill/RBT1_14.tar.Z (source code from 1994)


In favor of Brown historically:

The original, unannotated Brown corpus, a balanced sampling of English language usage, was collected in the 60s (long before BLLIP) by Brown linguists Francis and Kucera.

BLLIP Software and Corpora Resources

Brown Corpus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
site:http://www.aclweb.org/ "brown corpus" - Google Search

Anyway, have you checked out the course websites? Since you are seeking an MS degree, that could be a decisive factor.

Lastly, Brown has 2 links here while there are none for JHU:

Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing

[LaLena]

Yes, I checked.

For JHU the courses for Language and Speech Processing

Computer Science
600.465 Introduction to Natural Language Processing
600.466 Information Retrieval and Web Agents
600.665 Statistical Language Learning
600.765 Seminar in Natural Language Processing

And For Brown:
I could only find Statistical Methods of Natural Language Understanding , but there some courses on AI like Topics in Machine Learning, Topics in Machine Learning.

However in undergraduate I was enrolled in an MS-degree course “Topics in Natural Language Processing” by special permission, and its text book was the same as the course "Statistical Methods of Natural Language Understanding" which Brown offered.

And also, I think the average length of time to complete is three semesters for JHU and four semesters for Brown.