Need Suggestions on My Motivation Letter

Hey everyone! I want to apply for a Phd program in Europe. English is not my native language and this is my first motivation letter, so I had some difficulties while writing this. I hope to get some comments. Thank you for your help very much! I appreciate it.

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Dear Professor []

I am writing to apply to your PhD program: [Robotics and Artificial Intelligence]. As society entering into a era where human and Artificial Intelligence(AI) will coexist for a long time, the deep combination of Robotics and AI is becoming significant and my ambition is to be a researcher on Artificial Intelligence with specific expertise in robot learning.

After receiving bachelor degree in computer science, I entered into XXX University to pursue my master degree due to the interest in software engineering. In second year, I started my research on Source Code Analysis, in which I was trying to mine source code repositories using topic modeling from the Natural Language Processing(NLP) domain. In order to understand this approach, I took the Machine Learning course on Coursera and I just was fascinated by how sometimes a very simple equation will describe extremely complex phenomena and how we can squeeze nature into a formula. But more importantly, ML provide an implementing approach for AI and give me an insight of problem solving in the real world.In early 2016, the school of software engineering held First Tech Challenge 2016 robot contest(FTC), and I volunteered as a final match referee out of curiosity. I watched the robots built, designed, programed and operated to compete specified tasks, suddenly it occurred to me that what if combining these robots with machine learning or other approaches aiming to implement AI. Specifically, let these robots autonomously move to assigned area based on image data from camera sensor and actively practice to grasp balls instead of human controlling the them. This interesting thinking really intrigued and excited me for few days, but gradually faded from my mind by other projects and researches.

In early 2017, considering my excellent academic performance, Prof.XXX wished me to continue the research on this Source Code Mining to University of Zurich, but I declined with thanks after a deliberation and I was still intensely curious about the application of AI to solve real-world problems. Finally, I took the special offer from Tencent, which is a leading internet company over the world, where I worked as an associate researcher in Advertising Engine \& Data Algorithm Center. One year later, we built an online large scale advertising system called Walrus, in which we designed multilevel caching strategies based on Presto and its query efficiency increased by five to ten times than before. More importantly, we applied DeepFM - a Factorization Machine based Neural Network to enhance (Click Through Rate) CTR prediction, and this model beat all models that we built before such as Logistic Regression, CNN and RNN. During this year, I noticed most of the applications of Machine Learning were confined to a software and interacted with the world solely in the form of web application, cloud services and so on, but is there an agent carrying AI to interact with the world directly instead of data interfaces and meanwhile it can learn from its own experience instead of human feeding training data? I kept asking myself. Until one day I watched the video in Ted by Marc Raibert who is the founder of Boston Dynamics, in which he showed the SpotMini robot can run, hop and even open doors and I knew these robots are exactly perfect carriers for the AI and this thinking coincided with my idea one year ago in the FTC. Therefore, this particular momentum drove my desire to master Robotics and AI, and develop my career in this area of expertise.

I am a highly self-motivated person focusing on pursuing excellence. During the first year of graduate, resolutely working on academic courses ensured me the honor of The Excellent Student of XXX University. In the following year, considering my excellent research performance on Criminal Network Analysis, I won the China National Scholarship (top 0.2\% nationwide). In the last year, I graduated with the honor of The Outstanding Graduate of XXX University due to the excellence of entire graduate study and my graduation thesis on Source Code Mining with Topic Modeling. Complementing my academic performance are my strong skills in teamwork and communication. 2017 is the 110th anniversary of XXX University and one part of the schedule was to guide foreign friends to visit our campus. As the vice-president of Graduate Entrepreneurs Club, I coordinated Graduate Student Union to design the tour route meanwhile I volunteered to present some incubation projects for them in the XXX Venture Valley. With adequate preparation, the presentation finally won their admirations and Christian Thomsen, the President of TU Berlin, also spoke highly of our valley.

I really enjoy inspirations from learning new things. In my second graduate year, I took part in the project of criminal data analysis in the cooperation with local law enforcement agencies. At the first sight of data scheme of phone call records, the network analysis method came to my mind all of a sudden. When analyzing the network structure, I realized my works might borrow the some classical metrics from Social Network Analysis and performed a beautiful layout for the criminal network with data visualization. All of these is because I just finished the course of Social Network Analysis and Data Visualization on Coursera. Finally, our works was accepted by the the International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE2016), and a couple of months later was invited to submit paper to IJSEKE Special Issue.

"stay hungry, stay foolish" is my motto. In my resume you can see that I took lots of extra courses related to AI on Coursera since I was graduate student. Even after graduation, I still kept the habit of continuous learning. Despite my working hours at Tencent are 996, which means the work hours of 9am to 9pm and six days a week, I am still willing to spare time learning AI courses on MOOC, such as Coursera, Edx and Udacity. Last month I started to take the "Practical Reinforcement Learning" course on Coursera and read the Sutton's Book <<reinforcement learning>>, besides in order to have a understand of behavior cloning I have done a project of Behavior Cloning with End to End network in a car simulator after reading NVIDIA's End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars paper and now this network managed to drive on both know and unseen tracks endlessly. Surprisingly, I also started to build a robot by myself in the past few days.

I want to study at your University because of your outstanding educational system, focus on gathering relevant work experience, and your excellent facilities. From speaking with students and professors from your university and other universities, I am confident of my decision. With many distinguished scientists as professors, I know that I will gain expert knowledge at the forefront of discovery. Further supporting professors' lectures are your university's use of advanced equipment and cooperation with top AI research centers. All these strong positives allow me to to research cutting-edge technologies, such as robot learning, and to pursue my dreams and ambitions.

Given my past history of commitment to excellence, I am confident that I will bring a high level of energy and enthusiasm to your program. I am sure to exceed your expectations, because of both my academic and interpersonal skills as well as the experience gained from my working. I will enrich the program by enabling fellow students and professors to benefit from my ambitious and open nature. Furthermore, my foreign background and education will add more diversity to your program.

Please, consider my application for the doctoral position.