Graduate / "Ph.D. study in machine learning area" - SOP for Computer Science Ph.D. [3]

Hi all,
I have just updated my SOP. Please review my SOP. Thank a lot.

Because my long-term goal of my education life is to do research in the field of machine learning and teach in an academic environment, I wish to pursue a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science with an emphasis on statistical machine learning at XXX University.

I ranked 170th among more than 400,000 high school students in the National Entrance Examination for admission to Iranian universities in July 2000, and was accepted at Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT), one of the top three universities in Iran. I was member of RoboCup team for three years during my bachelor studies in computer engineering. Working with this group I learned the basic concepts of artificial intelligence, advanced programming skills for large-scale softwares, and, more importantly, teamwork skills. Meanwhile, we won the international RoboCup Soccer 3D Simulation, held in Lisbon in July 2004. Then I started the master's studies in computer science, with artificial intelligence major, in the same university. During this period I got the in-depth knowledge of different AI topics, such as neural network, statistical pattern recognition, robotics, image processing, machine vision, etc. I did several research projects, the most significant of which was my master's thesis in the areas of reinforcement learning and neural networks. I developed a new reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous state/action space, based on growing self-organizing maps. This algorithm benefits from a growing Q-Table, which makes the method superior to other RL methods in continuous state/action RL problems, in particular in nonstationary benchmarks. A paper based on this work has been accepted for publication in Neurocomputing Journal.

After my master study in machine learing, I decided to improve my background in mathematics,especially in statistics to prepare myself to be a member of a machine learning group in a top university.Therefore I attended the master program in statistics at ETH Zurich University in September 2009. I believe this was a turning point in my education life and helped me to learn fundamental topics of statistics. To fulfill the core courses of the master program, I have been required to take courses in regression, time series, analysis of variances, mathematical statistics, and multivariate statistics. In addition, to obtain an in-depth knowledge in statistical machine learning area, I took computational statistics, advanced computational statistics, advanced pattern recognition, machine learning and information theory courses. Furthermore, I am currently working on a research project about nonparametric estimation of modes in density functions and its extension to a regression context, under supervision of Dr. XXX. In this project we are analyzing the application of our method to some real data sets as well as investigating some theoretical properties of our method e.g. standard error of estimated modes. I want to continue this research direction in my master thesis. I will be awarded my masters degree by July 2011.

XXX University is a highly prestigious university and it has very strong faculty members in the field of Machine Learning. In particular, throughout my search among the faculty members of the university, I realized that my research interests exactly fit with those of Prof. XXX2. List of his publications and research projects demonstrates that he is an outstanding researcher in the domain of Machine Learning. Particularly I am interests in ... project and it would be an honor for me if I could pursue my PhD study under his supervision.

Finally, because of my strong background in both computer science and statistics areas and my experiences in several research projects and teaching assistantship, as mentioned in my resume, I believe that I am a good candidate for Ph.D. study in machine learning area at XXX University.