James E. Smith is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois in 1976. He then joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, teaching and conducting research first in fault-tolerant computing, then in computer architecture. He has been involved in a number of computer research and development projects both as a faculty member at Wisconsin and in industry.

Prof. Smith made a number of contributions to the development of superscalar processors. These contributions include basic mechanisms for dynamic branch prediction and implementing precise traps. He has also studied vector processor architectures and worked on the development of innovative microarchitecture paradigms. He received the 1999 ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award for these contributions. For the past several years, he has been studying neuron-based computing paradigms at home along the Clark Fork near Missoula, Montana.