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].
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ー spherical and hemispherical
panoramas as captured by drones and 360ー cameras, and creating new
images from them with updated geometry.
For some images of mine, along with descriptions and checklists of
some motorised heads that I use for creating panoramas, see my Image Gallery.
- 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ー, 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 オ4/3 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 113
th 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.
The pages and data here are for non-commercial
use only. All text content © Mike Cowlishaw, 2009, 2024, except
where marked otherwise. All rights reserved. Please see
http://speleotrove.com/mfc/ for contact details.
Privacy policy: the Speleotrove website records no personal information and sets no
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This page was last
edited on 2025年02月21日 by mfc.
