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I’m Mike Cowlishaw, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Visiting Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, and Editor of the IEEE 754 (ISO/IEC 60559:2011) standard.  I am a retired IBM Fellow^[1].

e-mail:	mfc@speleotrove.com
Websites:	speleotrove.com and speleogroup.org
Facebook:	Mike Cowlishaw

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My technical interests include:

• Mapping and cave surveying. I am currently writing a program, MapGazer, for bringing together and comparing maps, routes, walking and bicycling tracks, speleological sites, and other places of interest.

• Photography, including underground and 3D photography. A few of my stereo and panoramic photographs can be found in my gallery. I now only use cameras with viewfinders, and much prefer the small and lightweight (Canon Ixus 100IS, Panasonic LF1, Panasonic GM5).

• Bicycling science (in 2013 I took up regular cycling again, after a 40-year gap); I currently ride a Charge Mixer with 11-speed hub gear.

• Technologies for use in caving with Speleogroup, including high-power Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) and designing efficient circuits for driving them and testing them; also cave surveying equipment and technologies (dead reckoning and surface GPS, etc.).

• Tollos – a supervisor program for ARM Cortex microcontrollers which I am developing as a base for my experimental avionics and low-power caving aids; you can run it on the mbed and also many other devices, such as those from STM.

• 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.

• 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).

• The Rexx, Object Rexx, NetRexx, Java, PL/I, and C programming languages (I created Rexx and NetRexx). I shall add JavaScript to that list when it adds the decimal arithmetic support promised in 1999.

• 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).

• 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 T100T ‘transformer’ pad/notebook. Before that, I used an Asus Eee PC 900 netbook (to which I added a fast SATA 32GB solid-state drive) for 7 years. I also have a Lenovo Thinkpad X200s laptop, but it is so heavy it has never left its dock. Since 2012 I have been experimenting with Android devices (programming the Nexus 7 and various Android ’phones). My current favourite is the Sony Xperia Active, which doubles as an excellent bicycle computer, however I’ve had to replace that with a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact because Google kept ‘bricking’ the Active by installing apps that filled its memory ...

• 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 – it was originally written for OS/2.

• 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.

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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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^[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.

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This page was last edited on 2015-05-18 by mfc.