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

Friday 04/06/04 @ 12:10 pm

The sweet taste of freedom

Here I am. The exams are over, and I've completed two thirds of my degree - the scary thought is that this time next year I'll only be a few weeks away from graduation. I'm surprised at how quickly the exams went - then again they did only span four days (one on each). The exam on Monday went pretty well - I made a couple of silly mistakes, but nothing too serious. Tuesday was worse, in that I messed up Computation theory (by leaving myself too little time and not trusting my instinct), so I'll only have got about half marks on that question. The others were fine, although I did rush one of them. Thursday was rather similar, although to be fair, four of the questions did go very well. I managed to mess up Databases, by not writing enough down, since I realised that I had been thinking along the right lines afterwards. Thursday went very well though, and there were only a few minor mistakes (one of which was caused by misreading the question and therefore explaining more than I needed to). Overall, things have gone pretty well, and I hope that I'm on track for another first... we shall have to wait and see though - the results come out a week tomorrow, or so I'm told.

Anyway, enough about exams. They're done :-). After the exams, I went over to the Eagle with Alaric, Immad and Adam, where we met up with a load of other CompScis. We stayed for a drink, then wandered over to Wetherspoons, where we found that despite the early time it was already too busy to find seats in order to get food etc. So we went to the Ghandi to get some proper food. After filling up on curry, we went back to Wetherspoons, which by this time was overrun with CompScis. We bumped into Alex, who introduced me to a number of people that I had never seen before but was told were IB CompScis. So, we ended up going back to Jesus to the room of a guy called Dave, where we had more to drink, until one of the Jesus porters came and chucked us all out. Fair enough, the music was a bit loud (and there were some people with exams still to go), but this only adds to my perception of Jesus porters being the most miserable and grumpy that I know (my previous experience was in the second week of my first term here, when a porter refused to put my supervision work in the pigeon hole of my supervisor because it was a Sunday...).

Anyway, other than that it was a good night. I managed to find my way home from Jesus, then had a bit more to drink (since everyone else was still up and drinking) before going to bed. Today, I have to go into town to buy a dinner suit for the may ball. We're going to see Harry Potter 3 tonight, so I'm looking forward to that. Plus tomorrow, I'm going into London with Andrew and Sergio, for lunch and shopping etc.

By the way, watch out for the photos page appearing soon as promised...

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