Jim Smith
Who am I?
I'm a Professor in Interactive Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Department of Computer Science and Creative Technologies. at the University of the West of England, and Deputy Director of the Computer Science Research Centre.
I both teach and research AI: I am Module Leader for the courses Artificial Intelligence 1 and Advanced Artificial Intelligence.
In 2015 Gusz Eiben and I published a second edition of our textbook about Evolutionary Computation, with a supporting website.
I conduct theoretical and applied research into a a number of areas of AI, and for the last few years I've been particularly interested in:
- Systems that "learn how to learn" - for example by discovering
useful features in data, or by changing the way in which they
come up with new solutions.
This includes topics such as
the adaptation of search operators in evolutionary algorithms,
and of "memes" - which can be
thought of as the equivalent of different styles of learning that
individuals use to improve theirselves over their lifespan.
Aspects of my past and present work on Deep Learning Architectures also fall into this area.
- Systems that learn to do things from
interactions with people - for example providing intelligent support
that lets users "teach" software so that it can then act on its
own.
There's a wide range of topics here ranging across
psychology, the design of human-computer interfaces, and fundamental
research into the supporting AI methods.
You can find details sorted by date here, often with pdf copies to download, or grouped by subject, or type
My google scholar profile should be up to date and contains citation counts and various other statistics to give you a rough feel of what I've written that other people seem to like. I make no claims about the value of these metrics.
Current Projects
- Active Learning for Characterising Video Conference Meetings. Collaboration with VQ Commmunications Ltd.
- Hypergraph Partitioning with Memetic Algorithms
- Application of Unsupervised and Reinforcement Learning to assist in repayment and customer satisfaction Innovate UK-funded project with Flexys Ltd.
- Automated Systems to assist in the provision of legal advice helplines Innovate UK-funded project with Lyons Davidson Ltd.
Fuller details of these and my completed projects.
Current PhD supervisions:
- Emmanuel Smith: researching the role of personas in Explainable AI, focussing on time-series regression problems such as event prediction.
- Mohammad Mehdi Sobhani: researching the use of Dynamic Neural Fields for modelling Human Behaviour in Joint Actions for Developing Biologically Inspired Decision Making Models
- Nathan Duran: researching ways of using recurrent neural networks to perform Conversation Analysis, with the aim of improving Dialogue Management.
- Sooraj Rajsekharan: researching novel convolutional and recurrent neural architectures for creating spatio-temporal models of air quality.
- Claude Ujile: researching the use of machine learning to assist in the stabilisation of expansive soils (so that roads/buildings/segices can be built with more stability)
Details of my previous PhD students.
Contact Details
Contact Hours: I teach most of Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings, and I try to devote Thursdays and Fridays to research and research projects.
Therefore if you wish to contact me the most suitable times to ask for an appointment are 10am-6pm on Mondays and Wednesdays.
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