Wildfalcon

I’m a scientific and technical thinker. Trained in physics (masters), and computer science (doctorate) I tend to think about conceptual models of things, and how they can be created and manipulated. I also tend to drift off the point if I’m not careful!

At the moment I spend my days analysing web pages, or rather, developing software to do it for me. It’s a great mixture of generic software engineering problems, and domain specific problems. Traditionally web site analysis has been about what pages did a user view, and how can you uniquely identify a user. These are still hard problems, but have mostly been solved. The advent of Web 2.0 (in all its strange forms) is making the problem harder though, no longer does a users journey consist of discrete pages, nor even of one site. But easy problems would be dull.

Before that I did a doctorate in Grid Computing at the London E-Science Centre, Imperial College. I looked at scheduling competing componentised applications on distributed resources. By drawing an analogy with economics I showed that the problem could be split into two stages. The first stage being a multi variable multi input optimisation problem, which is analytically insolvable, but heuristically solvable, in this case using genetic algorithms. This is followed by a computationally simpler step of selecting from a set of ‘optimal’ solutions based on a form of policy, which turns out to have an exact mapping to elementary forms of socialist and capitalist economic (and philosophical) theories. Not surprisingly that was the limit of my thesis.

Expression takes a big part in my life. I love dancing, specifically latin American and ballroom dancing. I’m currently training to competitive level with my partner in latin dancing, and hope to do the same in ballroom sometime soon (time permitting). I’m always amazed by just how technically challenging it is, and that’s before you consider the non-technical problems of trying to express both yourself and your partner in a dance, especially as you don’t always have the same interpretation of a dance.

It was probably though photography that I first understood the real distinction between technical perfection and accuracy (which I never claim to have achieved) and expressiveness. I took a course, ‘The Art of the Snapshot’ which really fundamentally changed how I thought of photography as an ‘art’. I could even say I finally ‘got it’. Oddly enough it means I take far fewer photographs than I used to, but I’m much happier with the results. Finally I can point to some photos that I think communicate something about me, and many more that I think fail to do that, and its no longer about the technical aspects.