\documentclass[10pt]{cseletter}
\usepackage[T2A,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

%\usepackage{times}
\setlength{\textwidth}{6.5in}
\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0in}
\setlength{\evensidemargin}{0in}

\setlength{\textheight}{8.5in}
\setlength{\topmargin}{-1in}
\setlength{\headheight}{0pt}
\setlength{\footskip}{0.5in}
% \setlength{\parindent}{0.3in}   %.5in
% \setlength{\parskip}{0in}       %.1 in or .2 in or 0in
% \setlength{\partopsep}{2ex}
% \setlength{\topsep}{1ex}
% \setlength{\itemsep}{0ex} %.5ex

\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{amssymb}

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\hfuzz=3pt
\vfuzz=3pt

\begin{document}
\date{\today}



% \address{Department of CSE\\
% University at Buffalo\\
% 226 Bell Hall\\  kornfeld@google.com
% Buffalo,  NY  14260--2000}

\signature{Dr. Kenneth W.\ Regan}

\begin{letter}{Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize Committee\\
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research\\
SSB-YSA Unit, Human Resource Development Group\\ 
CSIR Complex, Library Avenue\\
Pusa, New Delhi-110 012 INDIA.
}
\pagestyle{empty}
\thispagestyle{fancy}  %% fancy



\opening{\vspace{-1ex}\leftline{Dear SSB Prize Committee:}}

%\email{regan@buffalo.edu}
%
%\url{www.cse.buffalo.edu/{\tiny$\sim$}regan/}
%
%\room{326}
%\phone{(716) 645-4738}


I am delighted and honoured to recommend Professor Amlan Chakrabarti for a Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology.  For both disclaimer and background, I have worked with him since 2007 when he was a graduate student whose advisor was being recruited by my department.  This was to develop a novel analysis system for quantum computing via polynomial algebra.   After long percolation and a Boolean algebra contribution by my own PhD student Chaowen Guan, our paper appeared in the journal \emph{Transactions on Computational Science} last year.  My earlier article about this work on Richard Lipton's prominent \emph{G\"odel's Lost Lette}r (GLL) weblog can be found by searching the title ``Grilling Quantum Circuits.''

I understand the SSB prize to be interdisciplinary.  I am a theorist, but my role on the GLL blog commands knowledge of diverse areas, and I have a separate AI/ML programme of a predictive model for human chess play that is used to arbitrate allegations of cheating by consulting computers during games.  (My reports prompted a set-up that caught a grandmaster named Igors Rausis in a story covered by major media last month.)  This gives me insight into Professor Chakrabarti's AI/ML and other work, albeit not full grasp of it. I can start by saying that I have rarely been more impressed by a talk than by his presentation of medical imaging work at the 2016 ZIBACAR National Seminar in Pune (http://www.zibacar.in/national-seminar-2/).  What struck me most was that I counted nineteen (19) separate steps that needed to be applied in order to achieve the needed resolution.  This combined statistical, deep-learning, and hardware components, including several different kinds of filters.  Each of the filters was standard (one if I recall was Kalman feeding into PCA), but the sequencing of so many different steps, each at a precise moment, gave it the brilliance of a deep chess combination.  The talk ended with the fruits of his group's system being adopted by hospitals in the Kolkata area.  This is computer science in Renaissance mode.

I cannot write this letter without saying what is obvious from Professor Chakrabarti's record: an incredible number of diverse publications and a meteoric ascent in the community culminating in his becoming Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Technology at UC. When he hosted me during the Bengal Global Business Summit last February, I was dizzied by the amount of responsibilities of communication around the city as well as the research of his several groups.  I accompanied him to the downtown campus and the HQ near the north expo park and to RKMVERI where my PhD graduate Tamal Biswas is on the faculty.  What I am attesting besides the obvious is the warmth of engagement in the whole of computing-related fields combined with sustained intellectual depth in the field I know best, quantum computing.  I have set his joint papers with the famous professor Niraj Jha and others at Princeton as models for my student to follow while writing up his thesis now.  Lipton and I remain quantum computing skeptics, but if the physical/engineering hurdles are cleared, a lot of this work and others around the globe will ramp up a hundredfold in practical impact.  

All of this, I believe, is exactly the mantle that a winner of the SSB Prize should bear.  In any event, Professor Chakrabarti will be a vital life force in the nation for many years to come.





\closing{Yours sincerely}

\end{letter}

\end{document}

