Letters / 'the best student I met' Recommendation Letter for Electrical Engineering Phd Program [3]

Please help me on the recommendation letter, I wrote my own recommendation letter on bahalf of one of my professor. He will review the content again and make any change before sending it. Thanks in advance!

To whom it may concern,

I'm writing this reference letter at the request of Mr. David Liu who is applying for a PhD program at your university.

I am his lecturer for one of his courses Multimedia Coding & Processing and the supervisor for his final year project (FYP) Object Detection with Flexible Part-based Models.

David drew my attention first in my class in the autumn semester of 2010. The reason is not because of David's good scores of the examination in my course but his outstanding performance in the project inside my course.

This was a project about designing a photo ranking system. In this project, students are expected to develop a photo quality evaluation system, based on the two papers of this area and the lecture notes prepared by me. In order to inspire students to make the use of their intelligence and potential, there are four types of bonus rewards for the groups with the best, second best and third best performance, and the most innovative browsing interface group.

David managed to accomplish his work after understanding the content of papers, extracting the key ideas from them and implementing the photo ranking system in Matlab. What David impressed me most was that his group not only got the bonus for the most innovative browsing interface, but also obtain the bonus for the second best performance. He was the exceptional student who got 2 bonuses simultaneously in my class and thus ranked first in my class undoubtedly.

During the process of doing this project, David was not satisfied by only comprehending the essence of the papers. He searched the relevant literature for new photo ranking features as well, and integrated them with the old ones into his system successfully. That was why he could enhance the overall accuracy of his photo ranking system significantly and achieve the better performance over other groups of students, which also demonstrated his strong interest to explore new stuff and self-motivated independent learning ability. Moreover, David put much effort and spent many hours on this project, so he was able to develop a brilliantly attractive and compelling website to manifest the ranking results of his system. He showed his enthusiasm and dedication to this course and his performance really surpassed my expectation, though it was a project in undergraduate level.

This summer David contracted me and asked me to be the supervisor of his final year project (FYP). Convinced by David's excellent academic performance during his career of undergraduate, I asked my Phd student Wanli Ouyang to arrange a project about object detection for him. David worked on a research project focusing on object detection with flexible part-based models, building up small part models for pose estimation in multi-resolution and integrating features to form composite models.

Just after acquiring a general description of the project, David searched the literature for many papers on that subject and read them carefully on his own initiative, so he could ask good questions and appear well-prepared in the following meetings. In addition, David often took the initiative to acquire a better knowledge of more advanced topics and to derive new hypotheses after copious reading and contemplating, which had not been proved practically but showed his creativity and competence in independent thinking. Though his research project is still on the way, he has shown the predilection for exploring something new and educating himself suggesting the potential of a good researcher.

In addition, David kept a nice relationship with his FYP partner, Bing Xu. David had the ability to pull his own weight on the project and to compromise with Bing on several occasions. Bing and David decided by themselves to work on different aspects under the same project, so as to make progress more efficiently. David focused more on developing part models in multi-resolution, while Bing concentrated more on extracting new features and integrating them together. Until now they cooperate with each other well and they are engaged in their own part.

In summary, David is clearly the best student I have met among the batch of his department. I am confident that David will become a good Phd student. Hence I hope David can start his new adventure in your university.