Academics and Work (Current)

Saif is pursuing a doctorate in Computational Linguistics from the University of Toronto (UoT) where he is a research assistant and advisee of Dr. Graeme Hirst. Computational Linguistics or Natural Language Processing is a field in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science. It encompasses numerous areas of research aimed at enabling machines understand natural languages such as English, Hindi, and French. Saif's present research is in determining what words and concepts co-occur with a concept. This has many "applications" including word sense disambiguation, estimating relatedness of concepts, and document clustering. These days he is especially interested in cross-lingual approaches that help machine translation, and solve problems in resource-poor languages. Saif regularly T.A.'s (works as a teaching assistant) at the St. George and Mississauga campuses of UoT.

Academics and Work (Past)

He received his masters in Computer Science from University of Minnesota under the guidance of Dr. Ted Pedersen. The master's research  was focused on word sense disambiguation—identifying the intended sense or meaning of a word, based on words surrounding it. His bachelor's degree is in Electronics Engineering from Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, University of Pune. He worked for TATA Consultancy Services (TCS) immediately after his undergraduate degree as an Assistant Systems Engineer. After a year in the industry higher education beckoned to Duluth, Minnesota and then Toronto, Canada.

Personal

Saif was born to Mr. Fakruddin Mohammad and Mrs. Shamim Fakruddin in the port city of Vishakhapatnam, India. Mr. Fakruddin is M.D. (Corporate Planning and Marketing) at Hindusthan Aeronautics Limited (H.A.L.), Bangalore. Mrs. Fakruddin has a bachelor's in law and home science. She was an English teacher for a few years but for some time now is a full time homemaker. Saif grew up in Sunabeda, Orissa, where he was blessed with a happy childhood, wonderful friends, and lots of cricket. His favorite part of those unforgettable years was having a partner in crime—his year younger brother, Zameer. Right from learning to play chess at age four and three to learning to drive in their teens, they did most everything together. Zameer is now a doctor in medicine pursuing his master's in surgery at the Nagpur University. Saif's interests include hiking, biking, tennis, and ice skating. He enjoys movies, music, and reading, as well.