</> Dr. Alan SmithComputer Science · live from Kyoto
Teaching remotely · Kyoto, Japan (JST)

Notes from the road,
lectures from anywhere.

I'm Dr. Alan Smith — Senior Lecturer in Computer Science. This year I'm on a private lecturing residency abroad, so I'm writing from Kyoto and teaching every class live and online, right here on this site. Read the latest below, then come sit in on a class.

Read the latest posts ▶ Enter the live classroom
14years teaching
3weekly live seminars
UTC+9current timezone
Now teachingonline
AS
$ whoami
> dr_alan_smith
$ location --now
> Kyoto, JP (UTC+9)
$ office_hours --next
> Tue 09:00 JST
$ status
> lecturing • online • open

From the notebook

Writing from the road

Notes on teaching, computer science, and life as a lecturer 9,000 km from campus.

Live classroom

Class is in session — join the room

A real video classroom running on Jitsi Meet: camera, microphone, screen sharing, live chat and a shared whiteboard, all in your browser. No download, no account. Type your name and walk in.

Live room room: SmithCS-MainLectureHall
🎓

Welcome to the lecture hall

Enter your name so classmates can recognise you, then join. You'll be able to raise your hand, share your screen, and chat with Dr. Smith and the class.

🔒 Your camera and mic stay off until you turn them on inside the room. The connection is peer-to-peer via Jitsi's open-source servers.

Weekly schedule

Upcoming live classes & materials

All sessions are broadcast live in the classroom above. Times are set in Kyoto (JST) and converted automatically to your local time.

🕑 Detected timezone: —. Kyoto is — your time.

About

Dr. Alan Smith

I've spent the last fourteen years teaching computer science — algorithms, distributed systems, and the slightly unfashionable art of writing programs that other humans can read. My research sits where systems meet human-computer interaction: how we build software that scales without becoming impossible to reason about.

This year I accepted a private lecturing residency overseas, based in Kyoto. Rather than pause my teaching, I've moved the whole thing online. Everything I'd normally do in a lecture theatre — the live seminars, the messy whiteboard derivations, the office-hours tangents — now happens in the classroom on this site. If anything, the chat box has made the quieter students louder, which I count as a win.

When I'm not lecturing you'll find me learning just enough Japanese to order coffee correctly, and failing to resist rewriting my lecture notes one more time.

🎓
Senior Lecturer, Computer ScienceSystems & human-centred software
🌏
Currently in Kyoto, JapanOne-year private lecturing residency (UTC+9)
💻
Teaching 100% online this yearLive seminars, recorded and archived
🔬
Research interestsDistributed systems, HCI, programming languages

Get in touch

Contact & office hours

Different time zone, same open door. Drop by a live office-hour slot, or send a message and I'll reply within a day.

Weekly office hours (Kyoto time)

Tuesday09:00 – 10:30 JST
Thursday17:00 – 18:30 JST
Emaila.smith@uni.example
Response time< 24 hours

Office hours run in the live classroom — just join the room during a slot.