Robert Shilston
Managing Director at FT Labs
- Location
- London, United Kingdom
- Industry
- Computer Software
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Robert Shilston's Overview
- Current
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- Managing Director at FT Labs
- Past
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- Owner at Assanka Ltd
- Director of Infrastructure at OnOneMap
- Manager of Technical Strategy at Furry Elephant
- Education
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- University College London, U. of London
- University of Bristol
- Recommendations
-
2 people have recommended Robert
- Connections
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118 connections
Robert Shilston's Summary
I am an engineer and proficient technical problem solver for Assanka, the London based web development company that I run. Over the past six years, in my spare time, I researched human perceptions of image blur and how this can be modelled. I successfully defended the resultant PhD thesis (at University College London) in February 2012.
I have a long-held interest in computers and their integration with other systems. This started with a hand-made ISA expansion card in the mid 90s that enabled the development of the first remotely steerable webcam in the UK, running under Windows 95 using a custom webserver for hardware control. As the web matured, I have remained at the cutting edge: Google Maps mashup in 2005, streaming breaking news to browsers in 2006, and most recently the launch of the FT Web App, the first significant HTML5 application, in 2011.
A passion for problem solving and a broad knowledge of the entire system stack from logic-level knowledge of processor architecture to HTML5 and CSS3 rendering has enabled me to be at the forefront of technological development over the past 15 years.
Specialties
Fluent in PHP, HTML5, CSS, SQL (MySQL), JavaScript, CentOS system administration and network infrastructure, my typical week involves problem solving and technical direction for both development and operations. I have significant experience in many related technologies, including Apache, Puppet, Varnish, KVM and am proficient in other products and protocols relevant to running a highly-available clustered virtualised LAMP platform.
Robert Shilston's Experience
Managing Director
FT Labs
January 2012 – Present (5 months)
FT Labs is an emerging web technologies group within the Financial Times. We were created as a result of the acquisition of Assanka by the FT. FT Labs is known for the FT web app, an HTML5 experience of FT content on tablets and smartphones, and its community participation in the world of emerging web standards.
Owner
Assanka Ltd
March 2003 – January 2012 (8 years 11 months)
I run Assanka, the web development company I founded in 2003 with Andrew Betts. We believed that web technologies offered businesses easier ways to manage their internal processes, and that a website didn’t need to solely act as a shop window to customers. This endeavour led to us pioneering many technologies over the years, from being the first UK Google map mashup, to creating a streaming solution for live blogging, and most recently releasing the world's first major HTML5 newspaper site for the Financial Times (http://app.ft.com).
Assanka was recently acquired by the Financial Times.
Director of Infrastructure
OnOneMap
August 2005 – November 2008 (3 years 4 months)
Late in 2005, we launched an innovative property search engine, letting house-hunters find property using the newly launched Google Maps API. OnOneMap proved a successful concept, and was incorporated as a business. It went on to be featured across the national press (BBC Radio 2, The Guardian, Daily Mail, PC Pro, CNN, and many others) and was successfully acquired by dotHomes in 2008.
Manager of Technical Strategy
Furry Elephant
2000 – 2007 (7 years)
Furry Elephant produce software to help teachers explain difficult concepts. I was responsible for the technical delivery of their products, from order tracking through software packaging suitable for school computer systems, as well as permitting individual students to download and activate stand-alone copies of the materials.
Placement
ARM
Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; ARM-GB; Semiconductors industry
June 2004 – August 2004 (3 months) Maidenhead
I spent ten weeks working for ARM, performing system-on-chip validation on the ARM1176 core. Specifically, the 1176 introduced new TrustZone technology, which restricts access to memory addresses and peripherals based on whether a given process is trusted. Amongst the validation that I performed, I implemented software tests to verify correct behaviour of register and trust preservation and restoration during multitasking. The 1176 core, once released, was the CPU in the early iPhones.
Overseas volunteer work
Volunteer
Nonprofit; Myself Only; Nonprofit Organization Management industry
January 2001 – June 2001 (6 months) Uganda
Before starting my undergraduate university studies, I spent six months living in Jinja, Uganda. I provided IT training and teaching in a number of secondary schools, and also to a charity that provided new water wells to villages that had not got access to clean, safe, sources of drinking water.
Robert Shilston's Skills & Expertise
Robert Shilston's Publications
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An Attention Based Focus Control System
- 2006 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing
- October 8, 2006
Authors: Robert Shilston, Fred StentifordWhilst the physical mechanism used by the eye to accommodate has been known since the mid 19th century, there have been few suggestions as to the method by which the human visual system controls the ciliary muscles. This paper proposes and explores an even function which, by building upon existing models of visual attention, could be used to model the eye's focusing mechanism. Specifically, by performing a two dimensional summation of the saliency score for each pixel in the image, it is possible to give the image an overall score. Focus can then be changed to maximise this score. It is anticipated that such an approach could be used to perform other parameter optimisation in image acquisition applications
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Preliminary subjective focus assessment results
- Proc. London Communications Symposium
- 2007
Authors: Robert Shilston, Fred StentifordFor both cameras and humans to see the world, they need to focus, yet they do not use the same focus strategies. This paper introduces these various strategies, in addition to several mathematical focus measures. An experiment to measure the human focus measure is proposed, and initial results are presented. These early results indicate that an attention based focus measure, using an RGB colour space using an RGB colour space matches the human focus opinions significantly more strongly than other focus measures.
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Auto-focus algorithm selection: A methodology for comparing blur perception between observers
- Proceedings of the International Classification Conference 2011
- July 12, 2011
Authors: Robert Shilston, Fred Stentiford
Robert Shilston's Patents
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Method for Focus Control
- United Kingdom Patent 20090310011
- Issued December 8, 2006
Inventors: Robert Shilston, Fred Stentiford
Robert Shilston's Education
University College London, U. of London
PhD, Computer Science
2005 – 2011
Dissertation titled “Blur perception: An evaluation of focus measures”, under the supervision of Prof Fred Stentiford and Prof Steven Dakin.
My thesis describes a methodology that was developed to benchmark focus algorithms against human results, and to guide the selection of auto-focus algorithms.
University of Bristol
MEng, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
2001 – 2005
Robert Shilston's Additional Information
- Honors and Awards:
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2012: GSMA "Best Mobile Innovation for Publishing" for The Financial Times Web App
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