Biography
Born and raised in England, Peter Smith received his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Computer Studies from Lancaster University in 1971 and his Ph.D also in Computer Studies from Lancaster in 1975. His graduate research, supervised by Professor Bryan Higman, was in the area of optical character recognition. Dr. Smith comes to Channel Islands from CSU Northridge where he was Professor of Computer Science and the faculty advisor to the student chapter of the ACM. Prior to joining the CSUN faculty in 1980 he taught in Wales (University College of Swansea) and Scotland (Strathclyde University).His research interests are in the area of text processing, particularly loss-less data compression of English text and fast string-matching algorithms. He is author or co-author of three Computer Science textbooks and is currently at work on a fourth.Peter Smith has been a Ventura County resident since 1990 and lives with his wife, children, cats and dog in Simi Valley. His hobbies include reading and gardening. He is a long-time supporter and shareholder of Manchester United Football Club.