Hi!
I'm a recovering physicist. I've researched patterns of academic collaboration, changes in the English language, computer-aided mammography, differences in software dependency networks and similarities between food webs, patterns of communication between suffragettes and air-traffic networks. I'm now most widely known for Tridactyl, an incredibly niche extension for the Firefox web browser and Interiors for CUP, a modification for a modification for ArmA, a military simulation game.
I hold a PhD in computer science from the University of Manchester. I was studying in the field of complex networks which doesn't fit neatly into any single domain—both my examiners were mathematicians and I hold a master's degree in theoretical physics. You may read my thesis online on the University of Manchester's website. My supervisor was Dr Eva Navarro-López1.
As part of my master's degree I worked with Ksenia Grozdova under Sue Astley on a project measuring mammographic density using computer vision techniques. (Before DeepMind made it cool).
You can view my GitHub repository at https://github.com/bovine3dom where you will find a small project I wrote for a C++ class, the code for the mammographic density estimation and, most importantly, my dotfiles. You might also stumble across Tridactyl, a weirdly popular niche Firefox extension I develop alongside an extraordinary number of other people. I generally programme in Python and Julia2. These days, because of Tridactyl, I write quite a lot of TypeScript too. I wouldn't say that was strictly by choice.
I've recently done some consulting work with a friend for a transport consultancy, building an open source tool to help explain the outputs of models of interventions. The tool can be seen here: https://github.com/IntegratedTransportPlanning/gcvt.
Contact
You can contact me at oliver—at—blanthorn—.—com. My PGP fingerprint is 15D0 3C86 8379 36A0 (which is attached to a email address I chose in 2005), probably most easily found at https://keybase.io/bovine3dom, also available on the MIT and Ubuntu keyservers.
