About
Since my teenage years until the end of my twenties, I lived a dual life. Both art and engineering were so fascinating to me that I couldn’t give up either. Alongside writing plays and directing theater, I earned my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from Amirkabir University. On top of that, I had to work as a programmer. Even though it was tough, I’m very happy because, fortunately, pursuing my Master's in Music Technology at Georgia Tech has placed me on an academic path where both worlds have merged.
If you ask my friends what Farshad does the most, they'll tell you I’m a writer. Writing began for me in my teenage years, when I would search through my grandfather’s old books for inspiring stories and always chose to write stories instead of reports during composition classes.
For my thesis in Music Technology, I’m working on creating a soundtrack-dialogue parallel corpus. You can probably guess how excited I am about it, as it combines literature, cinema, music, and computer science. Creating datasets is something I find truly enjoyable, perhaps rooted in my childhood admiration for my grandfather, who collected magazine archives. For my Computer Science master’s thesis, I published a dataset of Persian vocal music in MusicXML format, and for my undergraduate project, I built a tool for creating a multilingual machine translation dataset. Following that path, I’m now converting the Radif, the most important book for teaching Persian music, into symbolic music formats.
I foresee staying in academia because, after years of working as a software engineer, what I saw in its future was a rich but unsatisfied employee. I prefer to look at the positive side of that experience, which has given me the flexibility to take on any project. My experience working with diverse programming languages has made learning new languages and software a breeze. Additionally, my long-term, in-depth experience with distributed applications serving tens of millions of users will be incredibly helpful in expanding academic projects for the public and creating a broader impact. Furthermore, my time as a tech lead in large software companies has familiarized me with the industry's up-to-date, efficient organizational culture, making me well-suited for leading young, academic teams.
These days, I’m thinking a lot about new artistic mediums. Cinema was the first step in changing my perspective after a decade of working in theater as a writer and director. In recent years, I’ve produced three experimental short films, often taking on key roles such as screenwriter, director, cinematographer, and sound designer, sometimes out of necessity and sometimes out of passion. Still, I feel that just as cinema in the 1920s transformed from ambitious ideas into a new art form that no art critic could have predicted, today, we have tools that could easily expand into a more immersive and interactive medium. I hope that one day I can explore these new mediums with these two key concepts in mind.