I am a member of the Department of Computing.

Dr. Peter Smith was appointed at City University in October 1987. he had worked for several years prior to that in industry and also spent some time in Japan. He obtained his Ph.D. in Speech Act Theory at The Department of Philsophy at Leeds University in 1991. He obtained his M.Sc. thesis at Essex University in 1977 having been supervised by Professor Mike Brady (now at Oxford).

He has been research active in the field of Evolutionary Computing since 1995 and has authored several papers in this area one of which was published in Evolutionary Computing. He holds membership of the AISB.

He has also been a reviewer for the GP98, GECCO1999 and GECCO2000 conferences. he has acted as an external Ph.D examiner at The Universities of Essex, Ulster and Birmingham.

Peter Smith currently holds one research grant, from the TCD/DTI for 70,000 pounds which is concerned with operational risk in financial institutions. This grant is held jointly with Amelia Financial Systems.He is the main supervisor for 2 PhD students and one RA, and co-supervisor for 3 others.

Research Interests.

My primary areas of research are in genetic programming and stylometric analysis. In genetic programming I am concerned with scalability issues, particularly with strategies for extending search by the control of code growth. I am also interested in visualisation in genetic programming. In stylometric analysis, I am concerned with the establishment of a sound methodological basis for the subject as well as the use of function words for authorship determination and also for plagiarism detection.

Research areas of secondary interest include neural network architectures, here again I am interested in scalability issues. My other interests include non-linear regression, heuristic search techniques in AI, the compression of chess endgame databases and the application of AI in finance.

Selected Publications

Smith P.W.H. and Harries K. (1998) Code Growth, Explicitly Defined Introns and Alternative Selection Schemes. Evolutionary Computation 6,4, 1998, pp. 339-360.

Hadjiprocopis A. and Smith P.W.H. (1997) Feedforward Neural Network Entities. International Workshop on Neural Networks (IWANN97). In Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 1240, pp. 349-359.

Harries K. and Smith P.W.H. (1997) Exploring Alternative Operators and Search Strategies in Genetic Programming. In GP97: Proceedings of the Second International Conference. J.R. Koza et al. (eds.) pp. 147-155. Morgan Kaufmann.

Smith P.W.H. (1999) Controlling Code Growth in Genetic Programming. In R. John and R. Birkenhead (eds.) Soft Computing and its Techniques. pp. 166-171. Physica-Verlag.