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

Sunday 06/06/04 @ 02:03 pm

Exam-free repose

On Friday, I got up at a suitably non-early hour, and went into town with Andrew. We met Naomi at Teri-Aki for lunch, where I had some tuna and eel sushi. I must say that I quite like it, although the texture is the worst part - it does taste rather slimy, but then what do you expect for raw fish? After lunch, we headed over to Moss, to find a dinner suit for the may ball. I bought a very nice one, which I'm rather pleased with, although it fits pretty much perfectly at the moment, which means I'd better not gain any more weight... I also stocked up on my essential coffee supplies, from the guy at the market place, while we were in town.

In the evening, Matt, Sarah, Andrew and I went out to see the third Harry Potter film. It was very entertaining - I particularly liked the guy that played Professor Lupin. The main downside is that Daniel Radcliffe's acting is seriously not developing, and remains as wooden and lacking in emotion as it has been in the previous two films. Aside from that, the film is well worth seeing!

Yesterday, I went into London for the day with Andrew and Sergio. Upon getting to the train station, we found that the Cambridge/Kings-Cross line was down, and so we had to get a very slow train into Liverpool Street (it took about an hour and a half to get there!). We arrived in London at about 11am, and promptly went over to the East India Club for drinks and lunch. Unfortunately, their lunch didn't start until 12:30, so we decided to just have sandwiches, given that Sergio had an interview at 1. These sandwiches took rather longer to arrive than we had bargained for, and so we had to eat rather hurriedly, and grab a taxi to get to the British Library.

Sergio's interview was with this guy from some Italian law firm, which was for some reason to be held at the cafe of the British Library (sounded rather dodgy to me...). Anyway, Sergio went to the wrong place, leaving me and Andrew to find an Italian-looking person in a bow-tie outside the cafe (Sergio had gone to the wrong floor). It was the right person, so we directed him upwards. The interview underway, we decided to explore the library a little, only to find that a reader's pass was required to enter it, and that we would need written permission from the University Library in order to obtain one. So we wandered round an exhibition on silk instead (granted, it was more interesting than it sounded - they had quite a large stock of ancient Chinese manuscripts).

After half an hour, I got a phone call from Sergio, saying that his interview was over. When we met up with him, it turned out that he had got the job, which was very good news! We headed out of the library, and grabbed a taxi to the Tate Modern - the next stop on our agenda.

The Tate Modern is a very interesting place - I must admit that there is some very good artwork there, although this is mixed in with pieces that a pre-school child could easily out-do. Of course, it was very nice to see the originals of many of these famous paintings, so it was well worth the visit. After we had looked around the galleries, we walked across the Millennium Bridge (now no longer swaying), and then headed over to the shopping areas in search of a hat for Andrew.

Upon arriving at Selfridges, Sergio took us to a rather nice Brazilian restaurant where we each had a selection of Tapas, and a couple of caipirinhas. We then wandered around Selfridges, moaning about the price of suits, considering their quality. We found out that they had recently lost their hat department though, and we couldn't be bothered to go looking for another place, so we made our way back to the club.

Back there, we had a rest and a drink, before going down to dinner at about 7. As before, the food was very good, as was the service, and I very much enjoyed the meal. The place was slightly livelier that the last time I went, and we retired to the bar after the meal. We then got talking to an older member of the club, who had some rather strong opinions about terrorists and the British Empire, which lead to a heated debate, although he did buy us all port. It was soon getting rather late though, so we made sure that we left plenty of time to get the train back. As it turns out, we caught the last train from Liverpool Street, which once again took a good hour and a half to get back to Cambridge.

So that was Friday and Saturday, and today is likely to be somewhat less eventful. I'm going swimming pretty soon, but other than that, I'm going to have a lazy day.

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