“ Akbar is a “true” and passionate data scientist who knows about machine learning inside out, works very hard, and is always ready for any discussions with his colleagues. He always welcomes suggestions and criticisms and gives a prompt, positive response. He had successfully supervised our apprentices working on their MSc projects in machine learning. In the context of e-commerce, he has a broad range of knowledge, to name but a few: filter-ranking, learn-to-rank, named-entity-recognition, triangle semantics extraction and mapping, query understanding, reinforcement learning, tracking data analytics and quality, and deductive reasoning. I therefore recommend him without reservation.”