Welcome to lanther.co.uk
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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！
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Wednesday 27/04/05 @ 08:37 pm
Summer's in the air
I finally got my dissertation finished (or at least the first draft of it), and on surveying the damage I'm about 2000 words over the 12000 limit, so I'm going to have to cut things down a bit. Hopefully there's enough waffle in there that I can cut out, to bring the wordcount down. Last night, I ended up working until around 5am, which is unusual even for me - I was just getting SemCom working with small-step semantics (which I'd already implemented, just not properly tested), when I found a problem with the multiple matching analysis - it was failing to amalgamate some rules (and therefore not backtracking properly) because I was being too specific (which was ok for big-step rules) - basically, I had things like Assign(e1,e2) and Assign(Id(x),e2) coming up as separate clauses, and so an assignment with an identifier as its lvalue was not attempting the second case at all. In the end, I fixed it by amalgamating at the top-level expression, and doing individual pattern matching for each sub-case, as this allows backtracking to work properly. All is working well now though... phew!
Anyway, on Monday, I had the evening off, and went bowling with Matt, Nick, Christoph and Kristi (two of Nick's friends from France). I did manage to locate Matt, and we stopped off at the Geography department along the way, so he could print off his dissertation. We tried to get to the bowling alley by the back way, and almost stumbled into what looked like a high-security detention facility, but found the way in eventually. We were told at first that we were too late for the 'unlimited play' option, and would have to pay 4.95 per person per game! Bloody ridiculous! Luckily, it turned out that they had a 'monday madness' deal, which was three games per person for the same price. I played pretty poorly as usual, though I did manage a few strikes. Nick just likes to show off :-P
After bowling, we went to Bella Italia by the Granta for dinner - it's a lovely place. It's in an old mill, and they have the tables built so you can look down into the water flowing beneath you. Good food, good wine, good company - what more could you want? We attempted to go to riverbar afterwards, only to find that (predictably) it was shut. Though this time I did actually read the opening times, and its apparently closed every monday for private functions. That explains a lot...
So, other than dissertation-writing, yesterday and today have been very quiet. I went into town this afternoon for food-shopping at sainsburys, and you can definitely tell that summer's on its way. The trees have leaves on them again, people are out punting, and the colours are so vibrant. For example, here's the view from my balcony:
And no, before you ask, Matt isn't usually standing there ;-). Anyway, lectures start again tomorrow, so it's going to be all go from now on. Roll on the end of the exams!
Oh, and before I forget, Alex has set up a LiveJournal, so all must go and wallow in her worldly words of wisdom.
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