Tag Archive for 'information retrieval'

My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science

Published by davinci on May 24, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

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… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 12: the aftermath
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 13: dropping out
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people
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My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice

Published by davinci on May 23, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I had discovered, by the end of my first term in Waterloo, that while my father had maintained his negative opinion of quantum computing, it no longer seemed to enrage him consistently as it did before. This was a man who had screamed at me, beat me, locked me out of the house, and threatened to disown me for studying the components that make up quantum computing while I was in high school, but his reaction to the fact that I had resumed my studies — which he had expressly forbidden me to continue, under threat of being disowned — could only be described as mild irritation.

One of the main difficulties in coping with abusive authoritarian parents is the lack of consistency in their demands… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 13: dropping out
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
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The causes of my depression, part 19: the demographics of my graduate school labmates

Published by davinci on May 13, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

As I have described in several previous posts, my academic and social lives basically did not intersect while I was an undergraduate. In graduate school, these aspects of my life became somewhat re-integrated once again, because there were so many Iranians in engineering, and especially in my area of control systems.

I should perhaps go back a little and explain why the demographics of my graduate school labmates was noteworthy. Throughout my undergraduate years in Engineering Science, my father had been harassing me about my supposed inability to compete with students from mainland China… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. The causes of my depression, part 2: my high school predictions about the future
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
  4. The causes of my depression, part 17: my “frivolous” web site and how I learned Persian
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
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