Professor Leslie S Smith

University of Stirling

Leslie Smith was born in Glasgow in 1952.   He received the BSc in Mathematics in 1973, and the PhD in Computing Science (on software for multiple processor computers) in 1981, both from the University of Glasgow.   From 1974 to 1977, he worked in the computing industry. From 1980 to 1983, he lectured in Computing Science at Glasgow University, and then, after a year as an independent consultant primarily designing single board microcomputers, he joined the Computing Science Department at Stirling as lecturer.   In 2000 he was appointed as Professor.   From 1999 to 2002 and again from August 2008, he is the Head of Department of Computing Science and Mathematics.   He is a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the Acoustical Society of America, and a member of the Society for Neuroscience.   He was the founder and first chair of the UKRI chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Chapter.

His research interests are in biologically inspired processing, particularly of sensory signals. Biological systems are highly parallel, and extract some very precise information in real time from the sensory signals that they receive.   This work has led to a number of interdisciplinary collaborations with neuroscientists.   He has worked particularly on interpretation of sound signals, and on the processing of signals recorded by neurophysiologists: he is on the committee of the UK node of the International Neuroinformatics Co-ordinating Forum.