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 19/05/04 @ 01:55 pm

Less than two weeks to go...

I haven't updated in a while - mainly due to being buried under a pile of work. I have, however, done one or two more interesting things in the last week, so it's not all doom and gloom! Revision is getting there, but I won't bore you with any of that :-).

The 'big event' at the weekend was celebrated in due style - on Saturday night I went through to London with Matt, Andrew and Sarah, to a bar to watch the Eurovision song contest. It was of course very silly, particularly when it came to the voting (which is always extremely political). We did badly as usual, although we certainly beat last year's score (not that it was difficult to do...). Ukraine won, with an act comprising of women running around dressed like Xena warrior princess. On the plus side, we did manage to beat Austria though!

Yesterday, I arranged the fourth revision session, which was a bit of a let-down. In actual fact everybody except one person wasn't able to come, and the one person that explicitly asked for the session anyway, turned up 45 minutes late (by which point I was walking to the bus stop). I was understandably a bit pissed off about that, although I did manage to get some more revision done during the wait. I decided to go home via the botanic gardens, which was nice and relaxing - I even went and observed a few cacti.

In other news, I've ordered a digital camera, which means that I shall soon be taking numerous pictures and posting them on the site. Maybe I should wander around town looking like a tourist - on second thoughts, I'll save that until I'm feeling decidedly more masochistic. For those of you that do CompSci, Sam has put up a site that may be of interest - namely a lecturer quotes database. Some of them are very good :-).

Anyway, I have an exciting supervision on databases to go to now, so I must dash!

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