Beginning in my second term at the University of Waterloo, I started to work with Dr. Gord Cormack and Dr. Charles Clarke in the Programming Languages Group on some information retrieval problems. (They’re very easygoing and everyone just calls them “Gord and Charlie”, so it feels a little bit strange to refer to them so formally. But I will maintain this level of formality when referring to all of my professors for the sake of consistency.) I also took a course from Dr. Clarke on Automatic Question Answering.
It was quite fortuitous that Dr. Cormack and Dr. Clarke were members of the Programming Languages Group, to which I was thus assigned, along with other graduate students who were researching information retrieval. Programming languages was a topic to which my parents had no objection, presumably because my father had taken courses in it while he was in university. Some years afterwards, the Information Retrieval Group would be split off from the Programming Languages Group. But while I was there, I allowed my parents to draw their own conclusions about what I was studying based on my affiliation and the location of my office.
Dr. Cormack and Dr. Clarke were involved in the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), a yearly meeting co-sponsored by NIST to present and discuss research related to problems of information retrieval from large collections of data. The conference is subdivided into several “tracks”, each of which is focused on some particular information retrieval task. There had been an Arabic cross-language track in 2002, but it was not continued in 2003, although there were a number of other venues where I could have presented my results had I chosen to pursue the topic of information retrieval in Arabic or Persian. But I decided not to do this, because of my parents’ reaction to the idea.
Instead, I felt that I had to choose a topic that was both conventional and uncontroversial. Evidently, it was not enough for my parents that I studied only applied subjects, because information retrieval in Arabic or Persian was clearly an application of computer science which had very little to do with theory, and yet they still refused to allow me to study it. After considering several possibilities, I decided to work on information retrieval for bioinformatics applications, because it fit those criteria.
I could not imagine what my parents could possibly find to criticise about this topic. The Human Genome Project was often in the news, so they could not claim that information retrieval for bioinformatics was obscure or useless. If my father ever said to me, “Nobody is interested in that”, or phrased it as a rhetorical question as he often did, by asking “Who’s interested in that?”, I could easily point him to any number of popular articles demonstrating the interest in the topic coming from numerous quarters. It was conventional — it dealt with regular computers, and regular data, although large amounts of it. It was uncontroversial — it had nothing to do with international politics or terrorism, or anything which was very likely to upset my father. It was well-funded. And, I had something of a head start, because I was already familiar with the basics of information retrieval.
The next term, I took a course on Structural Bioinformatics from Dr. Forbes Burkowski while working on my research and thesis. I attended TREC with Dr. Cormack, Dr. Clarke, and their graduate students who were working on information retrieval, and I met some of the big names in the field. I began to study bioinformatics in earnest and finished my thesis, and hence my second Master’s degree, very quickly, having taken just four terms in total for the degree.
I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in computer science right away, but I was very torn about what I was going to study. A large number of people wanted me to continue in information retrieval or bioinformatics, and I felt very badly about disappointing them, just as I had done earlier with my professors in engineering. A number of other people wanted me to consider a career in intelligence, security, or espionage, because of my abilities in linguistics, computer science, and engineering.
Ironically, the fact that my parents had forced me to hide my interest in the Muslim world meant that I was actually better suited for certain careers than I would have been otherwise. I had the knowledge and skills of someone who had a degree in religious studies specialising in Islam, but there was not a hint of this on my university transcripts. I was also an expert in living a double life, thanks again to them, not to mention that my repeated interactions with them had inured me to psychological torture.
But I ultimately decided against this career path, because it would have placed me in direct confrontation with my parents, and left me with no time or energy for anything else. Furthermore, as I had already been forced to suppress my opinions for most of my life, I had no desire to put myself into a position where this would continue for the rest of it. I was determined that, whatever I had to say or write about religion or politics or any other controversial subject, I would say or write on the public record — as soon as I found a way around the hurdle of being attacked and prevented from working by my parents whenever I did so.
My rejection of this career path at that time meant that I would probably not be returning to it. The average undergraduate degree was three to four years, and after 9/11, many people had entered degree programs in various subjects related to Islam and the Muslim world. These people would soon be graduating, thus nullifying the advantage of my head start.
But what I really wanted to do was to return to quantum computing. How I did so, and the consequences that followed, will be described in the next several posts.
– davinci
Oh, no! You’ve given yourself away! Your academic transcripts may not reveal your religious and linguistic expertise, but now you’ve splashed that intel all over your blog. Way to go, superspy. What are you going to do the next time you’re masquerading as a mere scientist in Qum or Bam and a mullah decides to look you up on the Internet? I advise you to delete this blog immediately and do what you can to scrub it from web archives and search engines.