Born in Lebanon, I travelled a lot as a kid. I've spent a few months in many places - going for the weekend and staying until Beirut quietened down again enough for schools to resume. Cyprus was a favorite - and there was Riyadh, London, Cannes, and Cairo. The view from my bedroom window in Beirut, onto the Mediterranean, is one of the many reasons I miss home.
Somewhere along the way my family spent three months sailing around the Mediterranean. They're amazing, and now all in Beirut - sometimes in Cairo. Somewhere else I got obsessed with snowboarding. That was until I experienced the icy and cold U.S. North East resorts. Since then I've been messing with some interesting forms of throw-yourself-from-high-places-hang-from-cliffs kind of things.
Despite all the moving around, I managed to finish every school year in Beirut at the Lebanese Preparatory School. After graduation, I went off to the U.S. to go the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
My first job was during my freshman summer. I worked at a Scuba Diving center in Beirut while training for my PADI Dive Master with Walid Noshie. Unfortunately, my subsequent jobs didn't involve spending days on the beach and under water. My first "real" job was doing UROP work in holography with the Spatial Imaging group at the MIT Media Lab. Stephen Benton is really cool. Then I spent two summers at IBM Research working on Component-based Software Engineering, XML, and Java. I learned a lot, released some code into the real world as part of XML4J and filed for a patent.
I got my Bachelor's in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in 2000, concentrating in Artificial Intelligence and dabbling in creative writing. Lots of thanks to Patrick Winston for all his advice as my advisor, and for the Human Intelligence Enterprise (especially Jerry Letvin and the frogs). My first semester of grad school I was a Teaching Assistant for 6.001 (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) under Eric Grimson. That summer, I went off to India with Hala through the MIT-India program and taught Java and Javascript in Pune.
I got my Master's in 2001, also in EECS from MIT, while working as a Research Assistant at the House_n group in the Architecture department. Trevor Darrell was my thesis advisor, and Stephen Intille my supervisor. We built a tracker that uses dynamic programming to track multiple people in a space using real-world constraints. It was a multi-disciplinary group, and I had a great time especially working on the Medina project with three (not-computer) architects, Gian-Carlo Magnoli, Leonardo Bonnani, and Michael Fox. We won second place in an international competition =) although the prize money miraculously never made its way to us.
I went back to join IBM's Watson Research Center full-time in October 2001, living first in NYC and now in Cambridge MA and working with the same group: Francisco Curbera, Matthew Duftler, Nirmal Mukhi, William Nagy, and Sanjiva Weerawarana. Luckily for me, they had already begun working on Web services.
Since then, I've been working on service oriented computing, distributed systems, Web services middleware, XML standards, Component-based Software Engineering, and workflow. My focus is on services composition and coordination. I've also participated in a number of conferences and workshops by publishing papers, serving on program committees, and giving talks.
While at IBM, I worked closely with Dr. Frank Leymann on workflow and BPEL in particular. He would later become professor at the University of Stuttgart and take me on as his doctoral student. From then on, I was living in Cambridge, working in NY, and studying in Stuttgart. It was crazy but I loved it. By this time, I'd studied or taught for some length of time or another in Lebanon, Cyprus, the UK, Egypt, the US, India, and Germany.
In 2008, I became Dr. Khalaf - or to be more exact Frau Doktor rerum naturalium Khalaf :). A great thing really, although I do sorely miss the trips to Germany and the people there that I've come to know and love.
In the meantime, my brother has gone off and done the greatest thing ever, which is to start a full-blown scuba diving operation in the Red Sea .. and so I will live vicariously through him as I get the greatest computer-monitor tan in the North East, and give JC some grief (especially now that we've actually gotten married =). yep. dewd.