Mike Cowlishaw
FREng BSc
Formerly FBCS FIET CEng CITP
I’m Mike Cowlishaw, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, sometime Visiting Professor at the
Department of Computer Science at
the University of Warwick, and Editor
of the IEEE 754 2008 & 2019 (ISO/IEC 60559) floating-point arithmetic standards from
2006 through 2023.
I am a retired
IBM Fellow [1].
| e-mail: | mfc@speleotrove.com |
| Biography: | http://speleotrove.com/mfc/mfc_biography.html |
| Websites: | speleotrove.com and speleogroup.org |
| Facebook: | Mike Cowlishaw |
My technical interests include:
- Panoramas. My most recent programming project (available since
September 2018) is
PanGazer; a program for viewing
images and panoramas, including 360° spherical and hemispherical
panoramas as captured by drones and 360° cameras, and creating new
images from them with updated geometry.
- Mapping and cave surveying. I am also continuing to enhance
MapGazer, an application I
wrote for bringing together and overlaying maps (e.g., geological
and topographic), routes, walking and bicycling tracks, cave surveys,
speleological sites, and other places of interest.
- Photography, including underground, drone, 360°, and 3D photography.
A few of my panoramic and stereo photographs can be
found in my gallery. For travel,
I much prefer the small and lightweight (currently the Sony RX100M6
for its small size). For drone photography I use either a DJI Mavic
2 Pro or a DJI Mini 4 Pro. For 360° sphericals on the ground
I use a Ricoh Theta Z1, and for general panoramas various µ4/3 cameras
with tilting screens. For panoramas I use several motorised mounts
(see the Gallery link above).
- Computer arithmetic (I was the
Editor of the IEEE 754 Standard for Floating Point Arithmetic from
2006 to 2023), especially decimal arithmetic in hardware and software, including:
– the decimal data types and arithmetic in the IEEE 754 and ISO/IEC/IEEE 60559 standards
– the decimal data types and arithmetic in the ISO/IEC 9899:2024 C language standard
– the Decimal FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) webpage
– 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).
- Lightweight aircraft (microlights and ultralights); I hold a National Private Pilots Licence (Microlight), and until recently owned and
flew a single-seater 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.
- Technologies for use in caving with Speleogroup,
including drones for investigating hard-to-get-to speleological sites;
high-power Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) and designing efficient circuits for driving them and testing them; cave surveying
equipment and technologies (dead reckoning and surface GPS,
etc.); and bat detectors.
- Vision and colour perception (hence the colour highlighting in
LEXX and MapGazer), the interpolation and geometry used in PanGazer, and the sunlight shading algorithms used in PMGlobe and Palm Globe).
- Bicycling science (in 2013 I took up regular cycling again, after
a 40-year gap); I pedal a Charge Mixer with 11-speed hub gear, and
recently added a Volt Regent e-bike to encourage me to re-visit some
of the steeper hills in Warwickshire.
- Tollos – a supervisor program
for ARM Cortex microcontrollers which I developed as a base for my
experimental avionics and low-power
caving aids; it is written entirely in C and you can run it on the
mbed and also many other devices, such as those
from STM.
- Electronic publishing, including the Oxford English Dictionary (for which I wrote LEXX – the first real-time syntax-highlighting text editor) and
separately am a consultant), the design of its derivative, the LPEX editor (used in Eclipse), the IBM Jargon Dictionary, SGML, Wikipedia, the World Wide Web, and my GoServe Web server (the first
HTTP 1.0-compliant web server, used for my research tool, MemoWiki).
- The Rexx, Object Rexx, NetRexx,
Java, PL/I, and C programming languages
(I created Rexx and NetRexx).
- 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). Still struggling to find a phone that
has both a working compass and usable shutter release.
- PMGlobe; a programmable World
Globe that lets you see the world from afar, either from a fixed
viewpoint or turning with the sun (you can add your own places of
interest, measure distance, use macros, etc.); this predates Google
Earth by a decade or two, and, apparently, inspired it. PMGlobe
was originally written for OS/2.
- Cognitive processes, including neural, genetic, and evolutionary
algorithms and systems, especially empirical models that may give
insight into thought processes.
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.
[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. In IBM there were/are typically about 55 active Fellows out of around 400,000 employees.
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This page was last edited on 2024-12-24 by mfc.