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 30/04/04 @ 06:59 pm

Another week has passed

This week hasn't been particularly exciting in any major aspect, although I have done one or two things. I've had a couple of supervisions (one on compiler construction and one on complexity theory), which went fine. One upshot is that I now have the .NET IL specification documents, which means that I can have a look at writing a (simple) compiler for .NET once I have the time (which probably won't be until the summer). Yesterday, I went to a very interesting seminar on compiler certification, given by Mr OCaml.

Today, I gave the first of my revision sessions, which went pretty well. I ended up spending much too long talking about logic & proof, and too little time talking about semantics, but other than that it was fine.

I made the mistake, on Wednesday, of going to Borders on a 20% student discount day. Of course, I ended up spending way too much on books, although I bought a few interesting titles - a text on linguistics, one on 'philosophy of mind', and a copy of 1984 (something that I've been meaning to read for a long time). Well, I now have an even bigger 'to-read' pile, which is most certainly not a good thing when I'm supposed to be doing revision. I can try to persuade myself that philosophy is heavily related to artificial intelligence, but I doubt we're going to be examined on the subtleties of Descartes!

Anyway, looks like we're going to river bar tonight, so I should hopefully manage to become suitably inebriated!

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