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\newcommand\dude{YOUR NAME{} }
\newcommand\job{Travel Award to attend ICRA 2055}
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    \job 
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  \setkomavar{subject}[Subject: ]{\job~for Ph.D. student \dude}
  \opening{\vspace{2em}Dear Ladies and Gentlemen:}
It is my great pleasure and honor to strongly recommend \dude for the \job~such that he can participate 
at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) to present his article, accepted to the conference proceedings. I am writing this letter in strong support of his application. \\

I know \dude since January 2012, shortly after which he joined our institute as a Ph.D. student at 
Technische Universit\"at Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt). \dude already had an impressive record 
at this stage with an accentuated inclination for international research environments. After obtaining 
his Bachelor in Computer Science Engineering in Italy (where he designed his own robots as final
year research project) and a Master of Science in Machine Learning and Data Mining in Finland,
he moved to the combination of his research interests in his doctoral studies where he aims at 
teaching robot's how to learn a variety of new tricks ranging from robot locomotion over the use of tactile 
sensing in action generation to whole-body robot movement generation in the context of multiple 
contacts. To accomplish this variety of feats, he develops novel machine learning approaches 
based on Bayesian Optimization for Robot Gait Generation, Gaussian Process Regression for Robot Model Learning and Deep Belief Networks for Robot Tactile State Estimation. \\

\dude has been an active member of the international research community in two fields, i.e., 
Robotics and Machine Learning. In both areas, he has been an active member as well as a 
reviewer in leading conferences (including ICRA) and journals (including the IEEE Transactions on Robotics). He has been actively collaborating with other researchers in different European
countries including France, Italy, Finland, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. \\

\dude has also been an inspiring educator at Technische Universit\"at Darmstadt. He has
supervised several groups of computer science students during their 10 ECTS strong lab 
rotation projects -- to great success. He has been the Teaching Assistant for our lecture
``Robot Learning'' where he was highly creative at finding more pedagogical new problems 
for the exercises. Currently, he is co-supervising two bachelor students and an undergraduate 
research assistant.  \\

\dude is an extremely creative doctoral student who is actively interested and motivated in learning.
His thinking outside the box is typically matched by his hard work required to make his 
own vision become true. 
\dude is also natural scientific leader who aims at effectively exchange knowledge in a positive 
manner, where both his international experiences and his friendly personality serve him very 
well. He likes bringing people from different fields to find effective and novel approaches,
which has resulted in many different new research projects --- which we hope will result in 
DFG funding once our early work on them has been published. \\

During the past 16 months, \dude has been working hard on robot learning for tactile control during whole body movement in contact -- collaborating with Serena Ivaldi from the INRIA and Marc Deisenroth from Imperial College. Learning for tactile control is a challenging topic and by no means understood topic. It has implications for a wide variety of applications, ranging from more flexible service robots, humanoid robotics, field robotics systems that access disaster regions like Fukushima up to the solution of important societal issues such as helping humans as orthotic or prosthetic assistive devices or for rehabilitation. 
\dude's impressive work on included developing his own method, applying it on a real humanoid robot with artificial skin and showing that the resulting method works well in practice. The resulting work has been accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, \textsl{the} most important conference for this project. He is supposed to present the culmination of these 18 months of research and experimentation on a real humanoid robot. Such research led to learning tactile control during whole body movement with a real humanoid robot using advanced optimization and machine learning techniques. \\

\dude is enrolled for a Ph.D. until May 2016 when I expect him to graduate with an excellent Ph.D. thesis. I also expect him to start the search for a postdoctoral position for which this ICRA paper documenting his current will be essential. \\

It is crucial for \dude's career and scientific visibility to present his results to a specialized and interested audience as only EE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2015 can provide. This paper is the first article of \dude specifically in the field of learning for whole body control, and, hence, it is an essential first step in order to give him credibility and visibility in this scientific community.  Our institute currently cannot provide him with needed funds and it would hence be crucial if you could grant him the \job~ instead.
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Best wishes, 
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Jan Peters
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