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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 13/11/05 @ 07:06 pm

St. Marty Party

As everyone knows, November 11th is St Martin's day, who of course is the patron saint of wine. To commemorate this important occasion, Matija religiously organised a get-together yesterday evening - in other words, a St. Marty Party! Being prompt and British as usual, I was the first to arrive, but before long, the continental slackers showed up, and the festivities began.

In fact, the wine went down so well that we soon needed to make an excursion to top up the supplies.

Somehow, the subject of gherkins arose, which lead to much confusion amongst the non-British - in the end we had to resort to google to explain the concept, which is apparently dubbed a "small cucumber" in all cultures but our own.

What are gherkins? We just don't know

All this talk of pickles left Ezra somewhat bemused, to the extent that he began writing notes to himself in German, on the back of a maltesers wrapper...

"Mein kopf hat geboomt"

Whilst the Internet was present, Matija brought out some inside information about his supervisor...

"Gordon Plotkin must never see this!"

Of course, we couldn't put a bunch of Computer Scientists together without category theory being brought up. When it was realised by some that the course was over, there erupted a cheer of elation. This didn't stop Michael from writing down the definition of when a functor has a left adjoint though!

"No more category theory!"

As we entered the early hours of the morning, people started to leave, and the party came to a close.

Ezra, Jaro, Michael, Jorge, and I also left shortly afterwards, as soon as the admiration of Matija's socks was over.

"Nice socks - is that ANSI?"

All in all, a fitting tribute to that most alcoholic of saints!

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