Me on a cold night in Pittsburgh
Hi! It's unlikley anyone is actually interested, but my name is Paul Townend and at the current time of writing (February 2012) I am 33 years old, and thus the best years of my life are behind me!
I'm a researcher in the School of Computing, at the University of Leeds, in the UK, and have worked on a variety of projects funded both by research councils and industry. I'm currently working with Rolls-Royce and Cybula on a project called STRAPP, which looks at how provenance information can be introduced into a computing system to improve user trust. It's all very exciting, as I'm sure you can imagine.
Before all that, I did the usual education thing, although in my case I probably took it a bit too far, getting a total of 3 degrees (BSc, MSc, PhD). I did most of this at the University of Durham, UK, although I finished my PhD ("Topology-aware Fault Tolerance in Grids") at Leeds.
I'm interested in loads of things, but photography, music, astronomy, computer games and science fiction are probably the big items on the checklist. Pretty typical for a computer scientist, I think (except for the music! I like bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, Idlewild, Pendulum, The Birthday Massacre, The Cocteau Twins, and so on. NOT Tom Lehrer!)
I travel a fair bit with my job (seemingly mostly to the USA, although China is a fairly frequent location too) and try to take photos of my times spent there. You can probably tell, as a huge list of pages full of my photos should be displayed to the left of this writing. If it isn't, then please email me and let me know! I'm not a serious photographer - I don't even have an SLR; I just like what I like, and take the photos by pointing in the approximate direction of what I'm interested in, pressing the button, and hoping for the best!
I have a 6" Newtonian reflector telescope that I use to look at - you know - the stars and stuff, and I still (I've been saying this for years) hope to one day get a camera adapter and start taking astro-photos. I've got some of the moon, but I'd like to get nice photos of Andromeda, Jupiter and Saturn in the near future, too. And Mars, if I'm in the mood.
Email me if you want to know more, or, alternatively, if you just have nothing better to do.
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