# Collaboration

Letter
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Delft, Zuid Holland, The Netherlands
November 2021

To Whom it May Concern,

I am writing to recommend Yanbin He for admission to the doctoral program in Electrical Engineering at EPFL.

I have known Yanbin for more than a year now. He was a student in one of the applied optimization courses I instructed at TU Delft and later became one of the master students whose thesis I supervised.

During the time Yanbin was my student, I noticed he was sharp and curious. Despite being shy at the beginning, he seemed comfortable asking questions, and when he mustered confidence to raise questions, it was clear he thought things through. He asked questions about concepts that exceeded expectations of a student attending an 'applied' optimization class. It was clear that he was interested in the fundamentals and theoretical background of the methods we covered.
Due to his good performance during the classes given by the research group I was part of at TU Delft, Yanbin was invited to carry out his graduation project with us in the area of adaptive graph partition methods with applications to communication networks. Since the early stages of the project, Yanbin showed initiative and quick thinking by rapidly catching up with the material necessary for the research and with the preliminary work I had done for Huawei, the initiator of the research line. During his time working on the project, I was especially impressed by his dedication to the work and his grit, in particular when he found himself struggling with a particular problem. In his thesis, Yanbin established theoretical results for the partition of a bicolored graph, i.e., a graph with two types of nodes and edges, and also came up with several alternatives to perform quick updates for this particular partition problem. His results are now being prepared for a scientific publication.

On a personal level, Yanbin is an approachable and social person. He tends to be shy at first and struggles to communicate his ideas when he perceives certain hierarchy in interactions. However, in an open environment with trust built, Yanbin is able to communicate technical concepts as well as personal matters in a clear way.

Overall, I believe Yanbin is a strong candidate for the EE doctoral program in EPFL. He is equipped with the necessary technical skills to carry out meaningful research. I am confident that if the proper support to further his communications skills is provided to him, his performance will meet the expectations of any top PhD program.

Sincerely,

Dr. ir. Mario Coutino