Mike Cowlishaw
FREng BSc
Formerly FBCS FIET CEng CITP
I’m Mike Cowlishaw, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, an IBM Fellow [1], and a Visiting Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick.
| e-mail: | mfc@speleotrove.com
NB: e-mail will not be monitored for most of April 2013 |
| Websites: | speleotrove.com and speleogroup.org |
| Facebook: | Mike Cowlishaw |
| Twitter: | MikeCowlishaw |
My technical interests include:
- Lightweight aircraft (microlights and ultralights); I hold a National Private Pilots Licence (Microlight), and until recently owned my own flexwing aircraft (a Flylight MotorFloater). In 2012 I developed a simulation model of it for FSX.
- Weather research, particularly into wind gusts, their likelihood, and their relevance to light aircraft.
- Stereo imagery, such as aerial and underground photography and 3D cave surveys. I’m currently experimenting with a variety of viewing methods, of which the most successful so far is a passive 3D monitor (mine is made by AOC).
- Tollos – a supervisor program for ARM Cortex microcontrollers which I am developing as a base for my experimental avionics and low-power devices.
- Lightweight (preferably solid-state) computers (one such is the IBM Workpad, for which I wrote Palm Globe; another is the Acorn System 1 and the Emulator I wrote for that); I currently carry an Asus Eee PC 900 netbook (to which I added a fast SATA 32GB solid-state drive) and (less often) a Lenovo Thinkpad X200s laptop. In 2012 I am experimenting with Android devices (programming the Nexus 7, and have switched my ’phone to an Android).
- The Rexx, Object Rexx, NetRexx, Java, PL/I, and C programming languages (I created Rexx and NetRexx).
- Decimal arithmetic
(algorism)
in hardware and software, including
– the decimal data types and arithmetic in the IEEE 754 and ISO/IEC/IEEE 60559:2011 standards (of which I am the Editor)
– the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification
– the decNumber open source implementation of this in ANSI C
– the enhanced BigDecimal class for Java 5 (see Java SR-13).
- Technologies for use in caving with Speleogroup, including high-power Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) and designing efficient circuits for driving them; also cave surveying equipment and technologies (dead reckoning and surface GPS, etc.).
- Vision and colour perception (hence the shading algorithms used in PMGlobe and Palm Globe).
- Cognitive processes, including neural, genetic, and evolutionary algorithms and systems, especially empirical models that may give insight into thought processes.
- Electronic publishing, including the Oxford English Dictionary (for which I wrote the LEXX (now called LPEX) editor and separately am a consultant), the IBM Jargon Dictionary, SGML, Wikipedia, the World Wide Web, and my GoServe Web server (used for my personal research tool, MemoWiki).
[1] The IBM Fellow programme began in 1962/3; I was the 113th IBM Fellow appointed, in June 1990. I took early retirement from IBM in March 2010; as of that date there had been 217 IBM Fellows appointed. There were/are typically about 55 active Fellows out of around 400,000 employees.
Legend: FREng — Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering; BSc — Bachelor of Science; CEng — Chartered Engineer; FIET — Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (was IEE); FBCS — Fellow of the British Computer Society; CITP — Chartered Information Technology Professional. Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc.
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This page was last edited on 2013-05-23 by mfc.