September 30, 2013

The Registrar,
Blekinge Tekniska Hgskola,
SE-371 79 Karlskrona, Sweden

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing this letter to express my interest in the position of PHD Student

(Diarienummer BTH 3.1.2-0119-2013) in Computer Science at the School of
Computing at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona. I got my Master
degree in Computer Science from Uppsala University last week after the
successful evaluation of my Master thesis on September 11, 2013.
My career goals are to join a higher education institute as a researcher in the
field of data mining and machine learning. I got an A grade in the Research
Methodologies course during my Master studies. I have a flair for writing and am
a very good writer. Having three undergraduate degrees (one in computer
science, one in Physical and Mathematical Sciences, and one in English literature
and language), and one Master degrees I have been studying, doing research,
and teaching for more than 17 years by now. This has given me a habit of
working hard, studying most of the times and a zeal for teaching others. The
transcript of my Master degree with 7 A grades and 2 B grades proves this.
Moreover, the transcript of my undergraduate degree with a CGPA of 3.80 out of
4 also proves my hard work, dedication and enthusiasm for knowledge.
My love with data, and discovery of knowledge in the data began during my
undergraduate studies in Computer Science while taking a course on data
warehousing and data mining. That was the first time where I got introduced to kmeans algorithm, supervised and unsupervised learning, clustering, and
detection of anomalies in a sea of data. Finding the needle in a haystack is an
interesting and challenging task and that is what kept my interest in this area. I
bagged 3.6 Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) out of 4 at the data
warehousing course. Other related courses that I took at the undergraduate level
are Statistics and probability with CGPA 4 out of 4, and Artificial Intelligence with
a CGPA 4 out of 4.
When I started my Master studies in Computer Science in Sweden, I continued
this line of studies and throughout my Master degree I kept my relation with huge
data, and its useful exploitation. Courses that I took at the Master level include
Data Mining, Decision Support Systems, and Knowledge Engineering. I got an A
grade in the Knowledge Engineering course, Applied Artificial Intelligence and
Medical Informatics course. My Master thesis was in the field of text mining and

during this thesis project I developed an algorithm that can detect and classify
threat of school shooting in written text. The algorithm was evaluated by
implementing a prototype in Java. A pdf copy of the Master thesis project is
attached with this letter.
In the Medical Informatics course, I did research on the use of medical data and
the possibilities of exploration the sea of medical data available in the medical
systems and repositories. During this course there were 8 groups and I was the
sole member of group 7 as I was interested in doing a project on the benefits of
medical data and its mining where as the rest of the course participants were
interested in user interfaces of the medical systems. The focus of my research
was on the challenges that lie ahead for the success of mining the medical data
due to the inherent problems of medical data e.g., data availability, quality, preprocessing, and inadequacy of the available data mining tools required to mine
the huge databases of medical images. Working independently on this project, I
presented my work alone and got an A grade on the course.
In the data mining course at Uppsala University, we did three assignments. In the
first assignment, using Amos Miner, we analyzed the given unknown numerical
data to find out the best setting to classify it. By best setting I mean we wrote
source code for the Amos Miner to find out the best data normalization method,
the best distance function and the best value of k for the given dataset. We
tested various values of k without normalization and with normalization of the
given data and applied different distance measures and used the number of
misclassified records to evaluate the performance of the code for the best value
of k. To validate our results, we performed leave-one-out cross validation for our
selected settings.
In the second assignment of the data mining course, we conducted cluster
analysis on two sets of data and evaluated the performance of DBSCAN algorithm
and K-means algorithm to find out the difference between the properties of the
two datasets; decide the number of clusters using Principal Component Analysis
and 3d-projections; and the relative performance of the DBSCAN algorithm and Kmeans algorithm on the given datasets.
In the third assignment of the data mining course, we conducted Association
Analysis by writing code to explore the set of transactions in the given data in
order to find out the best values of the parameters minsupp (minimum support),
minconf (minimum confidence). Using the data given, we found out that Frequent
Pattern-growth (FP-growth) can be inefficient when the database is sparse but
works better on larger number of frequent item sets as it avoids scanning the
transaction table multiple times. On the other hand the Apriori algorithms takes
more time as it scans the transaction table many times and therefore, its
performance decreases when the table has a larger number of transactions.
I believe that the education at the graduate school will broaden my knowledge by
studying advanced courses, working individually on complex real life problems as
well as on a team of professional experienced researchers at the BTH. This will
not only give me a chance to learn from the researchers of the DISL research

group at BTH but also offer me an opportunity to contribute to the research group
DISL by infecting them with my love of knowledge, hard work, and fruitful
academic discussions. My previous teaching experience at College of Education,
and College of Flying Training, PAF Academy Risalpur, School of Electronics and
School of Aeronautics PAF Base Korangi, Karachi Pakistan makes me an ideal
candidate for the teaching assistant of the professors at BTH. Working as a
teaching assistant would further enhance my experience by working as a Master
Thesis supervisor and teaching university level courses. This will help me in
realizing my career goals to join a university as a faculty member or post-doctoral
research fellow.
I am looking forward for this chance in order to be able to play my part in
extending the frontiers of scientific knowledge and help humanity solve their
problems by learning from the past experiences of others recorded in the sea of
data generated everywhere around us. I want to help other human beings by
making decision support systems that will assist them in the process of making
correct decisions taking help from the knowledge discovered in the available
data.
I have enclosed a copy of my curriculum vitae (CV), a pdf file containing contact
information of 2 reference persons, a pdf copy of my Master thesis, a scanned
copy of my Master degree from Uppsala University, course transcripts of the
Master in Computer Science, and a scanned copy of the transcript and degree of
my undergraduate degree in Computer science (with the title Master in Computer
Science because Pakistani Master degree is equivalent to Swedish Bachelors
degree).
I will gladly provide any other additional information if needed. I am ready to
start immediately. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Ajmal Khan
Personnummer: 710428-2632
Contact Address:
Mster Palmsgatan 5 D
LGH 1001 Post Code 21158
Malm, Sweden.
Cellular Phone Number: 07 36 56 41 95
Email Address: ajmal.khan.email@gmail.com