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 15/06/05 @ 12:31 pm

God bless America

Just a quick update to say that I'm safely in Princeton. Just got up for the start of a new day (it's 7.30 here) after the incredibly looong yesterday - in the end I was up for over 24 hours, having gone to bed at 12.30, and awoken at 2.30 to get the 3.45 bus to the airport. Funnily enough, I met Michael Compton at the bus stop - who was on his way to Stansted for a holiday in Barcelona! Also, my arms were surprisingly not aching after swimming on Monday with David and Ruth.

I arrived into Newark at about 12 (local time), and was out of the airport by 12.45 - Elisabeth met me there, and we drove to the lab in Princeton. We then went for lunch (the third in my case, after food on the plane ;-), before spending the afternoon doing boring stuff like paperwork and setting up bank accounts - yes, I now have an account with the Bank of America!

After the bank account setup, I went and had a chat with Sandy for a while - there's loads of really cool/interesting stuff that I could potentially be doing. In any case, he's going to give a series of seminars throughout the rest of this week to get us in the mood and such! After work, Dave, John and myself went out for a meal at some restaurant place that I forget the name of, and John kept on bursting out laughing whenever the waitress asked us anything. We went to an icecream parlour for dessert, which was nice, then headed back to the apartment for some wierd blue American juice thingy, and an early night.

So, the weather here is sweltering (I had to sleep with the fan on last night), but the town of Princeton is great, the apartment is great, and the lab is great (with very good air conditioning ;-). All in all, looks like it's going to be a great summer.

By the way, we don't have an ADSL line in yet, but picked up a wireless network somewhere, so using that ;-). Pics will appear soon, when I've had chance to take some, etc.

Have a nice day! :-P

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