January 21, 2000 Subject: Letter of Recommendation for Mr. Francis Piéraut To Whom It May Concern, Francis worked under my supervision as a member of the Adaptive Deciders development team from January 10, until August 20, 1998, at Microcell Labs, the research center of Microcell Telecommunications, a Montreal based society specialized in mobile telecommunications. I was then a research director responsible for the research and development of new learning algorithms specialized in data mining applications. The main responsibility of Francis was to add a special kind of learning algorithm, decisions trees, into our object oriented software library. This project was the subject of his last year project in Computer Engineering studies, from which I was also his project director. He presented to us the algorithm and integrated it incrementally into the library. He demonstrated the correct implementation of the classical algorithm with some examples and added afterward new features decided by us. At the end he produced a good report on his entire work. During his project, Francis showed a particular interest in algorithmic design and optimization problems. He understood quickly the mathematical foundations of the algorithms he implemented and some of the theoretical notions related to the use of such algorithms. He also showed he had good programming skills and was able to understand easily how to integrate his code into the already huge library we had. Francis was able to work quite autonomously, while being very friendly and open to the rest of the team. Overall, I think Francis is a very conscientious and able employee. I certainly believe he has what it takes to make a good computer scientist in any research and/or development team. Sincerely, Samy Bengio ----- Samy Bengio Research Director. Machine Learning Group Leader. IDIAP, CP 592, rue du Simplon 4, 1920 Martigny, Suisse. tel: +41 27 721 77 39, fax: +41 27 721 77 12. mailto:bengio@idiap.ch, http://www.idiap.ch/~bengio