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

Wednesday 04/05/05 @ 10:23 am

Deobfuscation

I finished writing the second draft of my dissertation last night, which is now within a hair's breadth of the word limit. The main problem before, was that I'd just used too many words, with stupid phrases like "in order to facilitate". It's funny, but you don't notice you're doing this (or at least I don't) when I'm writing - only afterwards when you read through it again. Anyway, it reads a lot better now, so I feel at least that I'm converging on the finished thing.

Yesterday, Sarah came for a flying visit, in her short time away from Paris. It was great to see her again, though only makes me realise how long it is until the end of the summer, when I'll see her and Andrew and Naomi and Sergio and goodness knows who else again. I got back from lectures shortly after 1, and headed into town with Matt and Sarah for a bite to eat at Eat. We then headed back to college - or rather, Sarah to her supervision, and Matt and I to college, with a detour to the History faculty library, for Matt to get a book out. I even bumped into the somewhat bemused Katharine, exclaiming "Michael! What are you doing in the history faculty??" Maybe that should be my new purpose in life, to bewilder people - I could do with some of Llewellyn's conspiracies!

Anyway, Sarah got back from her supervision, and we headed back into town with Matt, to the Anchor, for a drink, before Sarah had to get a taxi to the station. So we said our farewells, and went our separate ways, and that, I suppose, is that.

That's about the most excitement for the time being, though tomorrow is likely to be pretty hectic. I need to go get a visa photo taken today - annoyingly, they require it to be about half an inch wider than the normal passport photo. So looks like I'll be paying an arm and a leg for a bit more shoulder. Metaphorically of course.

Well it's off to lectures for me now, so I shall leave you with this parting wisdom. Never appoint Papa Lazarou as lead developer.

"My wife was right, there is a bug in your program, but um... I fixed it now."

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