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 01/07/05 @ 04:56 am

What is freedom? We just don't know

So, another week has passed since my last update. I fly back to England tomorrow, for both my graduation and 21st birthday on Saturday, so that should be great fun! Hopefully the flight will be on time, and I'll be able to make my way through the Bob Geldoff crowd...

Last Friday, in the evening, John and I went with Sandy to the Lehigh Valley Velodrome in Pennsylvania. It was a perfect evening for it, and the racing was great. I particularly liked the Madison races, where a pair of cyclists form a team, whereby they sling-shot one another whenever they swap over (it's the most efficient way to transfer momentum). Other than that, the weekend went by uneventfully, as has most of this week at work. I've moved my attention over to access networks (although I still have one foot in naming semantics), which is starting to get quite interesting, now that I have some intuition of the problem space.

Last night, John and I made another visit to the supermarket, at the local shopping mall. We were rather impressed, when we found some shelves full of products from none-other than Great Britain... it was in the 'ethnic section' :-). In any case, we were able to treat ourselves to a spotted dick pudding, and apparently, Elisabeth can get us some custard, so the world is looking good!

When we got back from the supermarket, it started raining in earnest. This was of no concern to John, however, who decided that since he was going to have a shower, he might as well take advantage of the forces of nature.

We have yet to receive complaints from the neighbours, but I don't know how long that will last.

Now, as I'm sure you all know, this monday is Independence Day in the old US of A, and in the run up to the celebrations, there is a lot of patriotic feeling. Not wanting to be left out, John and I did our part, by filling in the 'patriotism pack' kindly deposited at our door.

This evening, in fact, was the Princeton firework display; an early celebration of this war that we, ummm... lost. Not that that means we can't enjoy the fireworks. The evening began in the office, with my hard working colleagues pictured below. As you can see, Chee Wei is working hard as ever, whilst John is demonstrating the effects of too much NFS hacking.

Once we left the office, with the intent of meeting Sandy and Elisabeth at the picnic site, John, Dave, Chee Wei and I set out in the direction of the Engineering library. It's a pretty impressive building, and we managed to get our printing password to work, so all was well and good.

The firework/picnic site was by a good old American baseball pitch (home of the Princeton Tigers, so I am told).

We had a nice picnic, whilst waiting for the fireworks to begin.

Of course, before they began, we had to all stand up for the American anthem, as is the ritual here, and we greatly enjoyed this local custom as you can see.

The display itself was pretty impressive, and went rather mad towards the end, with a profusion of smoke that even started to obscure the fireworks themselves!

By the end of it all, we had all had our fill of bright lights and loud noises, though Dave was a little shell-shocked that it was all over.

So, all in all, an excellent evening. I now need to pack, check train times, and make sure I'm all prepared to catch my flight tomorrow. Wish me luck!

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