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

Monday 29/03/04 @ 03:07 am

Difficult decision

I've just got an email from Peter Sewell offering me the research internship that I applied for (working on the semantics of TCP sockets). Problem is, I've also been offered an internship working in the product engineering group at ARM. So now I have to decide which one to accept - harder than it sounds!

On the one hand, the research internship would be really good experience for going into research, and would enable me to learn a lot more about TCP (in quite some detail), work with higher order logic (HOL) systems, do a bit of low-level systems programming, and improve my ML (they do most of the coding in OCaml).

The ARM position, though, would get me some industrial experience, and greatly improve my C/C++ programming. It looks like there might be some work on integrating the ARM C compiler into Visual Studio .NET as well, which could be quite interesting. It has the potential to be quite cool.

Decisions, decisions... I think I'll leave it until the morning!

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