John Lees-Miller

Recent Articles

• Jun 11, 2023: Bootstrap Confidence Intervals in SQL for PostgreSQL and BigQuery
• May 24, 2020: Testing with Node and Docker Compose, Part 3: End-to-End
• Jan 12, 2020: Testing with Node and Docker Compose, Part 2: On the Frontend
• Oct 19, 2019: Testing with Node and Docker Compose, Part 1: On the Backend
• Sep 6, 2019: Lessons from Building Node Apps in Docker (2019)
• Jan 1, 2019: From Zero to Driverless Race Car with Deep Learning
• Mar 18, 2018: The Mathematics of 2048: Optimal Play with Markov Decision Processes
• Dec 10, 2017: The Mathematics of 2048: Counting States by Exhaustive Enumeration
• Sep 17, 2017: The Mathematics of 2048: Counting States with Combinatorics
• Aug 5, 2017: The Mathematics of 2048: Minimum Moves to Win with Markov Chains
• May 1, 2017: Evaluating Compression with Pareto, Docker and Gnuplot
• Jul 4, 2016: How a Technical Co-founder Spends their Time: Minute-by-minute Data for a Year
• Mar 6, 2016: Lessons from Building a Node App in Docker

About

• He is a co(de)founder at Overleaf, an online editor that helps scientists write papers collaboratively.
• He did a PhD on how to efficiently operate fleets of driverless cars, so we'll be ready when they get here. That was in the engineering mathematics department at the University of Bristol.
• He was part of the team that delivered the world's first Personal Rapid Transit system at London's Heathrow Airport in 2011 — computer-guided taxis on dedicated roads.
• He was a post-doc at the University of Southampton, and then the University of Bristol, where he worked on ways of cheaply tracking cars through road networks to help us understand how people make travel decisions.
• He studied computing science at the University of Alberta.

Publications

• Reis, P., Lees-Miller, J. D., and Laqua, S. Merging SaaS Products In A User-Centered Way – A Case Study of Overleaf and ShareLaTeX. Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2021. (doi) (best case study award; top 2%)
• Mascia, M., Hu, S., Han, K., Sun, A., North, R., and Lees-Miller, J. D. A holistic approach for performance assessment of personal rapid transit. Research in Transportation Business & Management. 2016. (doi)
• Box, S., Lees-Miller, J. D., Snowdon, J., Hammond, J., Hamilton, A., Gupta, S., Wilson, R. E., and Waterson, B. 30 cars, figure of 8, 1 show: large scale proving ground experiments to investigate junction control. In 45th Annual Conference of the Universities’ Transport Study Group. 2013a.
• Box, S., Lees-Miller, J. D., Snowdon, J., Hammond, J., Hamilton, A., Gupta, S., Wilson, R. E., and Waterson, B. Lessons from proving ground experiments to investigate junction control. In 16th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transport Systems. 2013b.
• Wilson, R. E., Anable, J., Cairns, S., Chatterton, T., Notley, S., and Lees-Miller, J. D. On the Estimation of Temporal Mileage Rates. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 80:139–156, 2013. (doi)
• Lees-Miller, J. D. Minimising average passenger waiting time in personal rapid transit systems. Annals of Operations Research, pages 1–20, 2013. (doi) (preprint)
• Lees-Miller, J. D., Wilson, R. E., and Box, S. Hidden Markov Models for Vehicle Tracking with Bluetooth. In TRB 92nd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers. 2013. (online) (preprint)
• Lees-Miller, J. D. and Wilson, R. E. Proactive Empty Vehicle Redistribution for Personal Rapid Transit and Taxis. Transportation Planning and Technology, 35(1):17–30, 2012. ISSN 0308-1060. (doi) (preprint)
• Lees-Miller, J. D. Empty Vehicle Redistribution for Personal Rapid Transit. Ph.D. thesis, University of Bristol, 2011. (thesis) (code)
• Lees-Miller, J. D. and Wilson, R. E. Sampling for Personal Rapid Transit Empty Vehicle Redistribution. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2216:174–181, 2011. (doi) (preprint)
• Lees-Miller, J. D., Hammersley, J. C., and Wilson, R. E. Theoretical Maximum Capacity as Benchmark for Empty Vehicle Redistribution in Personal Rapid Transit. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2146:76–83, 2010. (doi) (preprint) (slides)
• Lees-Miller, J. D., Hammersley, J., and Davenport, N. Ride Sharing in Personal Rapid Transit Capacity Planning. In R. R. Griebenow, editor, Automated People Movers 2009, pages 321–332. American Society of Civil Engineers, Reston, VA, 2009. (proceedings) (preprint) (talk)
• Lees-Miller, J. D. Method and System for Resolving Deadlocks In a System. Patent GB2457927 filed, 2008.
• Lees-Miller, J. D., Anderson, F., Hoehn, B., and Greiner, R. Does Wikipedia Information Help Netflix Predictions? In Machine Learning and Applications, 2008. International Conference on Machine Learning Applications 2008, Seventh International Conference on, pages 337–343. (doi) (preprint) (code)

Teaching

• EMAT20005: Product Realisation (Fall 2010)