Steve & Rene

Steve

Stephen P. Smith is a retired Director of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Enabling in Intel's Software & Solutions Group. He has lead Intel's engagement with major enterprise ISVs, such as SAP and IBM. Previously he was Group Leader in the corporate Manufacturing Automation group at Intel, where he was responsible for all the planning and scheduling systems in Intel's 300mm manufacturing Fab and Assembly/Test factories.

Dr. Smith vigorously pursues myriad research and development projects to apply computers to the automation of human tasks. Of particular interest are his projects to investigate the theoretical and practical aspects of Starbuck coffees. He continues to be fascinated by things that are hard for computers to do, including how to schedule machines, people, facilities, tools, sheep, bats, green ideas, ...

Dr. Smith received the B.S. degree in 1977, the M.S. degree in 1979, and the Ph.D. degree in 1982, all in Computer Science and all from Michigan State University. He was able to interact with distinguished scholars§ (and PH.D. committee members) such as: Anil K. Jain Richard Dubes and Carl Pageª. He maintained his extended stay at MSU because the school continued to pay him in the PRIP lab to do research in esoteric fields such as machine learning, clustering, and machine vision.  During this time, he was also a consultant with Babcock & Wilcox (and he didn't have anything to do with Three Mile Island). In 1982 he was awarded "Most Distinguished Graduate Student" by the Department.

From 1982-1991 he was a member of the research technical staff at a very remarkable little place called the Northrop Research and Technology Center (NRTC) in Palos Verdes, Calif. At NRTC, he studied a myriad research areas and quickly generated the highest scoring IR&D proposal for the Center. He was able to interact with such luminaries§ as (in no particular order) Steve Lukasik, Bill Athas, Einar Stefferud, Marshall Rose, Robert Hecht-Nielsen, Dwight Cass, George Bekey, HR. Keshavan, Danny Cohen, Pat Flynn, Dave Farber, Doug Lenat, Jeff Lankford, Rick Hayes-Roth, Jeff Barnett, and Rick Hoffman. It was here he met and fell in love with Symbolics Lisp Machines and his wife.

Dr. Smith was once a the National Merit Semi-Finalist, giving him a partial scholarship for college and he has been a National Semi-Finalist in the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes numerous times. As a member of the National Nissan Owner's Club he has been the recipient of numerous citations from local law enforcement agencies throughout the Southwestern United States.  In 1992 he was awarded Gold Card car rental privileges from Hertz Car Rental Company and in 1996 he was awarded Premier Member status in United Airlines Frequent Flyer program.

His extracurricular activities include hiking, reading, and the casual pursuit of the senseless acts of random kindness.

§Please send me your name & web address to be added to this list.

ªThere is NO truth to the rumor that Steve first suggested to Carl's son Larry the idea for Google's PageRank algorithm.