Gothenburg, July 11th 2021

To whom it may concern,

Santiago has conducted his Master Degree Thesis work for his education in Applied
Mathematics at Viscando AB. I have been Santiago’s industrial supervisor.
Before his master project, Santiago has taken a course Mathematical and Statistical Modelling
at Chalmers University of Technology. In this course, students perform a project with an
industrial partner. Santiago did a project on AI-based anomaly detection at Volvo Cars.
Santiago’s industrial supervisor, Michael Fjellander, a former colleague of mine, strongly
recommended Santiago for the master thesis project at Viscando, mentioning his exceptional
mathematical skills, solid competence in deep learning and programming, as well as ability to
solve complex problems under time pressure.
During the master degree project named Modelling of Human Behaviour in Traffic Interactions
Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning, Santiago fully demonstrated the abovementioned
skills. It was impressive to see how quickly Santiago became fully competent in the area of
behaviour modelling, putting it in the context of scenario-based verification of autonomous
driving, a completely new topic to him. After a thorough literature review, Santiago identified
state of the art in inverse reinforcement learning for agent behaviour modelling, analysed the
shortcomings of available methods with respect to the autonomous driving use case, and
devised the implementation method. That method both suited the use case and offered
improvements over existing methods.
Further on, I was impressed to see how quickly Santiago implemented the method and
obtained the results that he presented in various ways to help understanding the performance
of the model. On this stage, he showed strong data analysis and presentation skills. Finally,
Santiago wrote well-structured thesis with mathematical and analytic depth.
We have experienced Santiago as self-driven and disciplined worker. He has conducted the
thesis work completely remotely (because of pandemics), yet we did not experience any
difficulties or delays. He provided a detailed summary on the ongoing and planned work every
week, both through web meetings and written reports. Because of this, the progress and plan
of Santiago’s work has been very clear to me; I never had any uncertainties or worries about
the progress.
I can strongly and sincerely recommend Santiago for the PhD program.
Sincerely Yours,

Yury Tarakanov
Project leader & Business developer at Viscando AB

Email: yury@viscando.com

Phone: +46 (0)725 21 12 00

Web: www.viscando.com

Address: Anders Carlssons gata 14, 417 55 Göteborg

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yury-tarakanov-225762