Welcome to lanther.co.uk

Welcome to my website. Please feel free to browse at your will, using the menu on your left. The main page below is home to my (long neglected) weblog for those of you that are bored enough to take an interest in what's going on in my life :-). I'm currently a Principal Scientist at Adobe, working on the architecture for asset management and collaboration in Creative Cloud. Prior to this, I was the lead developer for Creative Cloud Libraries - a revolutionary new way of sharing creative content between different applications, devices, and people. I previously helped to develop Adobe Scout, which was a visual profiler for Flash and AIR applications. Prior to this, I was a researcher in the Language Based Technology group at the Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen. I was part of the MT-LAB project, which is a collaboration between DTU, Aalborg University, and ITU, investigating formal verification techniques for advanced software systems. My particular research was concerned with probabilistic and stochastic analysis of distributed systems. I did my PhD in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh, supervised by Professor Jane Hillston. Previously, I studied at Robinson College, Cambridge. I originate from Bridlington, a little sea-side town on the Yorkshire coast. In the summer of 2005, I was a Senior Technical Associate at Fraser Research, in Princeton, New Jersey. Non-academically, I've been studying Japanese since January 2006, and I have been playing the fascinating game of Go since September 2006. I was previously the president of the Edinburgh University Go Club, and was a member of the Japan-UK 150 sub-committee for Scotland. My current grade is around 3kyu. Other than that, there's not much else to say. Feel free to enjoy the site! 楽しんでください！ Michael Smith

Sunday 18/12/05 @ 11:58 am

When snow melts, what does it become?

And so, a week tomorrow, it is Christmas Day! At last I have all my shopping finished, and I now await the arrival of Alex and Carl this evening (of course, before then I have to clean the flat and bake some mince pies ;-). Once again, the last three weeks have sort of rushed by in a blur, and so I'm left to make another belated summary.

The last week of November was the last week of teaching, which was something of a relief, to say the least. Since I was covering for a couple of people, it was busier than usual, but I got through it in the end. On Friday 2nd December, I gave a talk about my research at PEPA club, which seemed to go ok, despite the frantic last-minute preparations. In other words, on thursday night, after I got in from my last 4-hour demonstrating stint, I set to work both baking a cake (which I'd volunteered to do, since it doesn't seem fair for Jane to do all of the baking) and preparing slides. The cake was a lemon drizzle, which despite its humble appearance actually turned out very good, and indeed went down very well. Suffice it to say that the remaining cake that I brought back to the office soon disappeared ;-).

That evening was the Informatics Christmas party, complete with Ceilidh, which is traditional Scottish dancing (a bit similar to line dancing, but with kilts and bagpipes). I managed to avoid joining in, though Hua had a good time and was worn out by the end ;-). It was a pretty good event, if only for the company and the free food/drink, but I still left before everything was over, to catch up on some much-needed sleep.

On Saturday, Sandy and Elisabeth arrived in Edinburgh, so I went to meet them at the train station and guide them to their hotel. It was good to catch up with them, and we had a bit of a chat, before I left Sandy to prepare his slides, and showed Elisabeth how to get to Blackwells. Since they were meeting various relatives and friends over the weekend, I didn't see them for the rest of the weekend.

On Monday morning, I went to pick them up from the hotel, and we took a taxi down to the JCMB. After getting them settled into the visitors office, it was soon time for Sandy's visitation schedule to begin. For lunch we went over to the Swann building, and were joined by Phil Wadler and Jane. Later in the afternoon, after a few more visits, Sandy gave the LFCS seminar, which went down very well. Hopefully, he's got some more people thinking about naming semantics from a programming language perspective, so I'm hopeful that there will be some useful alliances out of this. Sandy felt like the visit had been productive, and he was keen to keep in touch with a few people in particular.

In the evening, we had dinner at Howies on Waterloo Place, which was very nice. Unfortunately Jane couldn't come, as she was exhausted (plus she had to travel down to London for the Roger Needham award ceremony the next day). Sandy, Elisabeth and myself were joined by Ian Stark and Paul Jackson though, and it was a great meal. On tuesday, Sandy and Elisabeth took the train back to Cambridge. Hopefully I'll be seeing them again sometime soon!

The rest of the week was fairly quiet, except for me coming down with a cold. I didn't get as much work done as I wanted, and in fact I've felt the last two weeks like I've been slowing down somewhat. I must really be in need of a break! I managed to get some more Christmas shopping done at the weekend, though annoyingly I left one of my shopping bags somewhere, never to be seen again. Oh well, these things happen I suppose.

Last week was similarly fairly uneventful, although we had the LFCS/ICSA/IPAB Christmas party on thursday afternoon. Somebody (Bill?) had decided to play some Chipmunks-style music, and the range of food was a bit eclectic, but it was pretty good overall. We spent most of the time playing cards (with the set we got from a Christmas cracker at the Ceilidh), which I haven't done in a while. I wonder if Jorge ever found out the name of that bread...

Anyway, I had better be getting on with preparations for this evening. Anyone would think I'm turning into a housewife or something!

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