Letter of Recommendation

It gives me lot of pleasure to recommend Mr. Pranav Sharma, a graduate of IIT Roorkee, for the PhD program
at your esteemed university. Through this letter I would like to vouch for his sincerity and proficiency.
He has been my student for a course on “System Engineering” in year 2013. In a class of 130, he was amongst
the top segment of students who were very much attentive and participative in my class. In his junior year in
2014, he took one of my elective course “Artificial Neural Network and Application”. This elective subject
was offered to senior year and junior year students of the institute. Top performing students from different
engineering branches studied this course as an elective.
As for his motivation for real application oriented and interdisciplinary research I remember an incident during
this course of Artificial Neural Network. In a compulsory course project he chose the topic of humanities and
social studies. On the project titled “Analyzing Students Inclination in Election 2014 based on Machine
Learning” he used the concept of Perceptron Learning, Support Vector Machine taught in the class. He
rigorously conducted an extensive survey amongst students and collected data. Further he designed a
mathematical model to link his data set with existing neural network model. From taking a challenging
ambiguous problem, he worked well with the technicalities of neural network and machine learning. While
maintaining academic integrity, he finally delivered results on the problem of his choice. I found this project to
be one of the very rare out of the box work.
He has remarkably improved his performance over the years. I was his mentor for Bachelor Thesis Project. In
his minor project, he used Kalman filter for motion trekking and calculation of number of individuals in a
crowded place. He verified his designed model in institute lecture hall. He obtained highest marks in the entire
batch of 130 for this project work. In his major project, he designed “Data Acquisition System for
Hybrid/Electric Vehicle”. In the entire batch of 130 students, his work both in Minor and Major Projects
obtained highest grade A+ (10 on scale of 10) for completeness, applicability and novelty. While supervising
him for B.Tech thesis, his dedication, commitment, presentation skills and articulation ability was fair enough
to identify a potential researcher in him. Also his long term vision to contribute in academic and research and
towards the development of the nation is praise worthy.
I remember him as a focused student, since the beginning of his junior year. He was very much determined to
pursue doctoral research in the domain of power system. On multiple occasions we had discussion on purpose
and need of research, interdisciplinary research and contribution towards betterment of the society. His
commitment, clarity of thoughts and articulation of new ideas impressed me throughout this period.
In order to pursue his interest in research, after graduation he instead of joining a respectable job opted for
research assistant position in IITB. He has always stood out among his batch-mates for his eagerness to engage
in acquiring knowledge as well as attitude for getting into new areas for discovery. I would rate Pranav Sharma
in top 5% of students I have taught in my teaching experience of 20 years. Seeing his dedication and enthusiasm
towards his undergraduate studies I feel Pranav is a deserving candidate for doctoral research. I strongly
recommend him without any reservations for Doctoral research and higher studies. I shall be happy to clarify
and points arising of this note.