John Smith
John B. Smith is Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been a faculty member there since 1984. During that time, he has taught courses and done research in hypermedia systems (he was co-chair of the first international conference on hypertext, which was held at UNC in 1987), a cognitive theory of writing, and in collaboration theory and systems (he is the author of Collective Intelligence in Computer-Based Collaboration, published by Laurence Erlbaum in 1994). Since 1995, his work has focused on Web-based systems. His current research is an attempt to radically simplify the design and development of enterprise systems, using automatic code generation.
Dr. Smith has a B.A. degree in mathematics from the University of the South (Sewanee), a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina, and over 40 years experience working with computers. His dissertation, a computer assisted study of imagery in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was published by Bucknell University Press in 1979. Before coming to UNC, he was a faculty member at the Pennsylvania State University where he held a joint appointment in English and the Computation Center; with respect to the latter, he was charged with promoting and enabling computer studies in the humanities. During his tenure at Penn State, he conducted a number of computer studies of language and literature subjects. He also wrote a series of papers attempting to define a notion of "computer criticism" by relating computer studies of literature to structuralist, formalist, and Marxists schools of criticism.
He is married to Catherine F. Smith, who is Professor of English/Technical and Professional Communication/Discourse Studies at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. Her areas of interest include writing public policy and the dissemination and uses of information in times of natural disaster. They have one son, Ian, who lives in central Pennsylvania. Additional information is available at his Web site: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jbs.
Return to Schedule of Events
Return to List of Participants