Saturday, March 19, 2011

[metapost] Apology

I apologize for being away for a while. A number of significant events in my personal and professional life kept me busy for the past few months.

First and foremost, as of today, I'm the proud father of a sweet baby girl. She got beautiful eyes, minute fingers, loud cries, lovely smile and she has got a name: Salma. I'm planning to make friends with her, but she doesn't seem to be an easy girl. She seems to know her mother very well, though.

Another significant event that occurred to me of late is the Egyptian revolution. I didn't feel so much pride being Egyptian until that day! Although I was thousands of miles away from the Tahrir Square (center of the Egyptian revolution), I was honored to participate with my voice to form the international pressure on Mubarak's regime.

On the professional level, I have recently joined the Machine Translation team in Microsoft Research, Redmond. This team is a blend of talented researchers and engineers working together to push the boundaries in this field AND shipping that to create a competitive solution. I'm definitely proud of belonging to this team.

The last piece of news I'd like to share with you today is that I got offers from CMU, UMD, UBC and Purdue graduate schools. I'm planning to visit a couple of them before deciding where I'm gonna spend the next 5 years of my life.

I'm back!