Pete's Odyssey

    A website and blog by Peter Lewis

About Me

me

Born in the dying days of the 70's, I'm currently living in Stirchley in Birmingham, England.

I was born in the sacred grove of Wellington, Shropshire, and spent most of my childhood in Kingswinford, in the borough of Dudley, in the West Midlands of England.

I graduated in Computer Science from the University of Leicester in 2001 and was subsequently elected President of the Students' Union for two years. Pages about the time spent there can be found here and here.

Though I spent time working in local government, as a ski instructor and in an MEP's office, I eventually elected to return to academia, and have now completed a Master's degree in Natural Computation at the University of Birmingham, for which I was awarded a distinction and the prize of "Best Student".

This means that I now know a fair amount about neural networks, evolutionary, quantum and molecular computation. My particular research focus was investigating economic and reproductive behaviours using an agent-based artificial society model. A poster summarising my summer project can be found here, and my MSc thesis is available here.

I am now a research student in the same school, working towards a PhD under the supervision of Professor Xin Yao and Dr Paul Marrow at BT Labs (my co-sponsor, along with the EPSRC). My working title is "Autonomic Solutions for Virtualised ICT Systems" and I maintain a page here about my work.

I'm also an activist, and when I make time, am involved in various campaigns. I'm mainly interested in the environment, peace, social justice, freedom (particularly digital freedom), respect and human and animal rights. I've been involved in People and Planet, am a fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe, a member of Liberty and supporter of Greenpeace.

I am a keen photographer and pretty much all my (half-decent) photos can be found on my Flickr page, while a selection of the very latest occupy the right hand site of the home page of this site.

I'm also a great believer in localism, sustainability and being in touch with one's impact on the world. In practice, a lot of this is manifested through environmentalism, such as attempting to reduce my consumption of stuff. I also grow my own veg.

If you're interested in any of this, why not get in touch?