If you want to know how tough to convince the profs at UMD, let me tell you sth.
One guy next to my lab published a short paper on PAMI. In that year, PAMI only published two pieces of paper from mainland, one was by this guy, the other was from Tsinghua. This guy also had another paper in the prceeding of ICDAR, the top 1 conference on document analysis. Finally, after several rounds of TAOCI, this lucky man got an offer from UMaryland@CP.
But if your target is only an AD, it is less competitive anyway.