Thanks, for the suggestions. Next year I will definitely try UK PhD programs. Nevertheless, I am still very biased towards the US for several reasons: 1. It has

Thanks, for the suggestions. Next year I will definitely try UK PhD programs. Nevertheless, I am still very biased towards the US for several reasons: 1. It has been a dream for me for a long time and I know that eventually I want to go study there. 2. The professors who are doing work that best matches my interests (RL applied to robotics) are mostly located in the US. The best match I would say are people such as Sergey Levine and Pieter Abbeel. Others are Anca Dragan, Dieter Fox, Emo Todorov, Drew Bagnell, Abhinav Gupta, etc. 3. The good universities in Europe which have researchers who are actively working in RL for robotics are not that many. Oxford is maybe the closest match. While the other universities mentioned also have very good people working in AI, their focus is usually either too theoretical for my interests or oriented towards pure ML and DL. I know this might sound too picky and fastidious, but bottom line is that I will be spending approx 5 years in this program, going very deep and working very hard. It is just going to be a failed PhD if I take a position just for the sake of doing a PhD and end up doing research that I am not really interested in.