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 07/05/04 @ 10:09 pm

A week in the life of a CompSci...

...or at least it would have been, if it had been in any way normal. For one, I've had no supervisions all week, on the basis that one of my supervisors hasn't responded to any of my emails asking (begging?) for supervisions to be arranged. My other supervisor is Australian, and realised yesterday that he had a cricket match on, so would have to cancel today's supervision. At least he'll be setting some more work before monday...

I did, in any case, make up for the lack of supervision by going to a seminar this afternoon, which was much more interesting than the title would lead you to think. Basically, it was to do with reasoning in first order modal logics using these things called 'counterpart relations' - extending Kripke's multiple worlds to talk about the relation between a variable and its 'counterparts' in future worlds. There was a much smaller turnout than with the seminar I went to last week.

On a whim, I wrote an SK-combinator interpreter yesterday, in C! Rather random, I know, but our lecturer on functional programming was talking a bit about it, so I thought I'd practice my C and YACC! Strangely enough for a C program, it worked pretty much first time - if you're interested, here is the lex source, the yacc source and the interpreter source. I'll leave you to compile it yourself - I've been running it on my PS2, so I haven't actually tested it on any other platform (let me know of any problems). I'll probably put up a page with little code-snippets like this at some point.

I had quite an interesting day on monday. Despite it being a pretty miserable day, I went into town after lectures, to go clothes shopping with Matt. I was in desperate need of some new clothes, and to this end our shopping trip was very successful. We had lunch at Henry's over at the quayside, which was very nice (although I suspect that it would have been uncomfortably busy had the weather been much better). We then promptly proceeded to tour most of the shops in the town center (Cult, TopMan, River Island, Gap etc.). I was persuaded to get some rather 'unconventional' items - the most striking of which was a bright green top and some 'designer' jeans (by 'designer' I mean that they have holes in them). Despite my initial reservations, I'm now really please with what I've got - it does actually look really good, and it's certainly a big move away from the more boring clothes that I usually wear. After this shopping spree, we retired to Borders cafe for a coffee, and then spent a further hour looking around the music section!

In the evening, we all went out to Trinity Vaults for the birthday party of Harriet (Andrew's girlfriend). It was quite a good evening - I got talking to Rosie, who didn't seem too frightened by me being a CompSci! We seem to have quite a lot in common (she's also a fan of Tolkien!). There was quite a bit of kafuffle with finding candles for the birthday cake, and getting people in the right place, but we managed it in the end. Unfortunately the evening was brought to a premature close, after certain people had a little too much to drink and had to go home. Apart from that, it was a good night though :-)

As for the rest of the week, I did the second of my revision sessions on thursday, which went well (although due to timing issues, the turnout wasn't so good). Also, I finished reading 1984 - I've come to the conclusion that it's a fantastic book, although it's both incredibly scary and depressing. As a social commentary though, it's a perfect example of how badly wrong things could potentially go - hopefully not in my lifetime though :-)

Last night, I went out for a drive with Matt and Andrew, which ended up taking us to the William Gates Building. I gave them both a guided tour, which suitably impressed them (I think), after which we wandered around the outside of the Cavendish in the dark. When we got back, I persuaded them to watch Spirited Away (fantastic film, might I add), although Matt fell asleep during it unfortunately...

Anyway, I have to get a bit more work done before we watch a film or something this evening.

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