About me « davinci’s notebook

I was, until recently, a Ph.D. student in the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Currently, I’m working part-time and looking for a full-time job.

I left the Ph.D. program because my parents had depleted my capacity to manage their abusive behaviour, especially their incessant attacks on my scientific research and my academic colleagues. They have disparaged my interests and denounced anyone who supported me for as long as I can remember, but I endured their criticisms, threats, and even beatings to continue with my studies. In spite of their hindrance, I earned two Master’s degrees, one each in electrical engineering and computer science.

In the most general terms, I am interested in two questions. The first is: what are the ultimate limits of science and technology? In other words, what are human beings (or indeed any intelligent sentient beings) in principle capable of knowing and doing? The second, which is in some sense complementary to the first, is: how do science and technology, or knowledge of the world and the power to manipulate it, affect the way human beings relate to the world and to each other?

The first question led me in high school to the topic of the fundamental limitations to information processing imposed by the laws of physics, and to the field of quantum computing which was about to blossom. My father forbid me to continue my studies, and when I suffered his punishments to do so anyway, he threatened to disown me if I persisted.

My exploration of the second question impelled me to think about how communications technologies can be used to further the spread of either knowledge or ignorance. On the one hand, widespread adoption of mass media technologies with global reach and a low cost of entry for authors would change the way science is conducted and communicated. Raw data and partial analyses and results could be shared in ways which would not have been possible before, fostering a spirit of ever increasing openness in the culture of science. On the other hand, the extensive reach of these same technologies would also, ironically, facilitate the proliferation of some anti-scientific and anti-modern ideologies and beliefs.

In the mid-1990s, some of the places where this latter phenomenon was the most prominent and stood to have the most serious geopolitical repercussions were within the Muslim world. I focused at the time on Pakistan and on the Urdu language. My father ridiculed the attention I paid to the Muslim world and to Islam, but in spite of this, after he threatened to disown me for studying quantum information and quantum computation, I began to study information retrieval in languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, in which many of the languages used in the Muslim world are written.

In university, I participated in interfaith dialogue and met other students who likewise struggled to resolve the conflict between their scientific education and the traditional values of their parents and ethnoreligious communities. I learned firsthand that I was not alone in having to cope with parents who insisted that their children acquire the symbols of the scientific and technological superiority of modern secular societies while simultaneously denying them the freedom which is the very fountainhead of this progress.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, my parents prevented me from making use of my knowledge of the Muslim world and the Islamic religion on the grounds that doing so “upset” my father. I turned my attention briefly to bioinformatics, but returned it to quantum computing when my parents made it clear that they would criticise and threaten me for my scientific research no matter what I studied. My brief foray into bioinformatics re-acquainted me with the practice of sharing code and data among scientists, and rekindled my interest in what is now called “open notebook science”.

My Ph.D. research focused on quantum lower bounds and the design of quantum algorithms, and in particular the discretisation of quantum algorithms originally formulated in the continuous-time paradigm. I am also interested in technical obstacles to the construction of scalable quantum computers and the application of control theory to quantum mechanical systems.

In addition, I am fascinated by how modern communication technologies have affected and will affect the way science is carried out and its ideas propagated — hence this experiment in open notebook science. Because of my personal history, I am also interested in how sociocultural values influence the perception, acceptance, and adoption of science.

– davinci (D. L. Yonge-Mallo)

Contact me

Find me on: LinkedIn/SlideShare/Facebook/Twitter/Flickr
Instant Messenger: davinci.yonge (Windows Live, Yahoo!)
Public key: davinci at stargrads dot net
(I don’t normally encrypt my e-mails, as this makes them impossible to search. But I’ve made my public key available here in case anyone wants to send me encrypted messages or needs to verify my identity.)