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]