Excellent idea for a thread.

I'm a moderately frequent commenter and very occasional poster here, reading since the beginning.

In the 1970s I studied pure mathematics as an undergraduate and theoretical computer science as a postgrad, and then worked in the latter field for some years. However, I now regard all the work I did there as a waste of time, despite the citation counts, and since around 1996 began to move into more practical areas.

I got interested in control theory and the particular subfield that has been the subject of most of my top-level posts here (intro), and have developed in physical simulation a walking robot based on those principles.

I've also developed software for script-driven real time procedural animation of human upper body movement as part of a project for animating deaf sign language. I think it works pretty well, and I'd love to extend it to more general animation for the obvious application area, video games -- with all respect to the deaf, animated sign language is very much a niche application. I haven't had time to seriously work on this, since what actually pays my salary at present is developing finite element methods and software for simulating biological organ growth.

I also wrote the article on artificial languages for the 3rd edition of the Routledge Linguistics Encyclopedia, and was the Klingon consultant for series 7 of "Big Brother". ghImlu'meH QaQ jaj vaghdich!

I'm currently studying stochastic calculus with a view to figuring out just what, if anything, classical control theory and Bayesian reasoning have to do with each other.

If this sounds like a resume touting for work, it's intended to. :-)