I am a second-year Ph.D. student where my topic is focus in the domain of civil engineering. However, I am also utilizing several machine learning/artificial intelligence in my application to achieve my end goals. While I understand that publishing in top computer science conferences such as NIPS, ICML is definitely a plus to my resume and achievement, I'm wondering will it be out of my research focus? From what I understand those paper submitted there are focused on producing theoretical contribution in the computer science domain and it would take quite some time to produce such contribution and I feel like I will drift away from my research topic. I'm asking this as I'm sort of being forced to submit there (aka supervisor pressure).
Any suggestion?