Efficient way to determine potentially good AI research groups in mainland Europe So I want to go about and compare different research groups for their standing, their potential for an exciting and fruitful environment etc. My field is Software Engineering with a heavy tendency towards AI in Reinforcement Learning. I'd prefer to stay in mainland Europe, more specifically the EU until the dust has settled on Brexit.

I googled a few times and found some answers. But as one person correctly noted, that is highly biased. I read "the best" several times and there obviously cannot be 5 number 1. While I don't need "1" everyone is obviously aiming to optimize their future and so am I.

In the past I have been looking at Barcelona, Brussels, Berlin, Zurich, Amsterdam, Vienna, Munich, Karlsruhe, ...

Finally, I decided to go about it a little different and download a few papers to base my decision on the publication / research level of various institutions. So I got myself scrapy and downloaded 2600 papers from ECAI, IJCAI and AAAI. I got them all stemmed and indexed with recoll and thought about doing some kind of structured analysis on them to get an overview of citations, referencing, publication count, names, institutions etc. 

Now before I spend a day on this: Has anyone else done this before? Is there some tool that helps doing such analysis already? And is it an appropriate way to get the quantitative side of the research quality of various groups?
This answer is coming very late, but just in case someone finds it useful:

http://csrankings.org/

This site ranks universities based on their research output in select top conferences in various fields, you could use this to narrow down your list.