Neil Smith's Homepage

What's New

Research

There are two main strands to my research. One is into the interpretation of imprecise diagrams. The other is into the nature of software evolution.

Many diagrams (such as UML class diagrams or sketch maps) are used to communicate something between people. Many of these diagrams also have formal rules of syntax. Unfortunately, when people draw these diagrams, they get the syntax wrong (we term these imprecise diagrams). Despite these errors, viewers of the diagrams are, more often than not, able to extract the intended meaning from the diagram. This is analogous to text, where people are generally able to make sense of ungrammatical sentences.

Our research in this is concerned with ways of automatically finding the meaningful sub-parts of the diagram, inferring their meaning (perhaps in the face of imprecision), and then combining these meanings to find the meaning of the diagram oveall.

I'm doing this with Pete Thomas and Kevin Waugh.

Moving on to software evolution, we are interested in how large software systems change over extended periods of time. Some of this work has used qualitative simulation techniques to look at the abstract behaviour of systems. We've also looked at agent-based models to simulate the growth of open-source systems.

My publications are available online.

Teaching

I'm involved in preparing and maintaining various database courses, such as M358 (Relational Databases).

Other Interests

I am a bit of a Prolog hacker in my spare time. I've put a few bits and pieces on my Prolog page, including a Lisp interpreter and compiler.

Miscellaneous

This is just somewhere to put all the various bits and pieces that don't fit anywhere else, but which might be useful to someone.

• Are you a Windows user that is fed up with not being able to use all the mathematical symbols you want, including a proper "less than or equal to" sign? neil.ttf is a TrueType font I've developed that includes all the symbols I've ever needed. If you come across a symbol I haven't included, let me know.

• Peter Coxhead has a very useful Referencing Style Guide.

Contact Details

I have a PGP Public Key