Mike Cowlishaw

I’m Mike Cowlishaw, an IBM Fellow based at the IBM UK Warwick location, and also a Visiting Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick.
(Warwick is situated in central England, midway between Coventry and Stratford-upon-Avon.)

My technical interests include:

• decimal arithmetic (algorism) in hardware and software, including
  • the decimal data types and arithmetic in the current IEEE 754 revision,
  • the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification,
  • the decNumber open source and commercial implementations of this in ANSI C, and
  • the enhanced BigDecimal class for Java 5, as described in Java SR-13.
• the Rexx, Object Rexx, NetRexx, Java, PL/I, and C programming languages
• cognitive processes, including neural, genetic, and evolutionary algorithms and systems, especially empirical models that may give insight into thought processes
• vision and colour perception (hence the shading algorithms used in PMGlobe and Palm Globe)
• high-power Light-Emitting Diodes and designing circuits for driving them
• 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 Lenovo Thinkpad X61 laptop
• electronic publishing, including the Oxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries, SGML, the LEXX (now called LPEX) editor, Wikipedia, the World Wide Web, and my GoServe Web server (used for my personal research tool, MemoWiki).