Ph.D. candidate Shirin grew up in Toronto, living in a neighborhood very close to UofT’s St. George campus, but her undergraduate and graduate school choice wasn’t a foregone conclusion. “I chose UofT solely because of its high reputation, especially in the computer science department and in the research areas I was interested in,” Shirin shares. Mathematics and logic always appealed to Shirin in grade school, and she was pleased to discover Computer Science, a field that fulfilled her desire for applying mathematics and logic to real life and hi-tech applications. Shirin is currently in the Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Representation research group, working under Prof. Sheila McIlraith on challenges facing the Semantic Web. “While today the Web is designed for human-interpretation and use,” Shirin explains, “the semantic Web proposes a vision for a next-generation Web that is computer-interpretable.” Her work focuses on Web Service Composition, which is a problem of finding a composition of web services that achieves the expected task efficently.
During her undergraduate years at UofT, Shirin began working on summer research projects under Prof. McIlraith’s supervision. “Prof. McIlraith inspired and motivated me to continue my education in graduate school… the summer experience made me realize that going to graduate school and doing research is what I love to do.” In fact, Shirin’s long-term goal is to be a professor: “I enjoy teaching, too… I hope to pursue an academic job to both teach and do research.”
Shirin acknowledges that there are people who believe Computer Science is a field that won’t stay so hot forever. However, she strongly believes that “CS is still in the early stages of development,” and the strength and potential of the field is supported by Shirin’s conversations with colleagues and friends: “I have personally found that recent graduates of UofT CS undergrad and grad programs are confident that they made the right program choice.”