ACTON, MA, August 31, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to name Raoul Normand Smith, PhD, a Lifetime Achiever. An accomplished listee, Dr. Smith celebrates many years' experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Professor Smith began his career after having dropped out of Brown University in the middle of his sophomore year and immediately enlisted in the US Air Force and was sent to Syracuse University to study Russian. He was then stationed at the National Security Agency and then the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
After his enlistment Professor Smith returned to Brown and received his AB degree in Russian in 1963 and his PhD in Linguistics in 1968, support for which was awarded by a National Science Foundation Research Grant. As a graduate student he taught TEFL methodology for three summers for a Peace Corps training project for Tunisia.
He began his professional career in 1967 with a joint appointment as a professor of Linguistics and of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. There he taught, among a variety of courses, the Structures of Russian and Czech, Old Church Slavonic, and Computational Linguistics. His publications while at Northwestern at this time were the book Probabilistic Performance Models of Language (1973) and various articles in computational linguistics revolving around the structure of the lexicon as well as articles on historical linguistics.
Professor Smith has had a long-lived hobby in antiques. One day while reading the magazine Antiques, he ran across the picture of a painting by Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847), a Harvard graduate, with some odd writing on it. It dawned on him that the writing might be in a phonetic code. He received grants from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct research on this phonetic and stenographic code. This resulted in the book The Language of Jonathan Fisher (1985) and various articles on Fisher's work on his so-called Philosophical Alphabet as well as on Penobscot Indian and Hebrew.
During this period he also consulted for Stenographic Machines, Inc on the computer translation of machine stenographic notes as well as on litigation involving various trademarks for various companies. And he served as a visiting professor at the University of Maine in Orono during the summer of 1978.
In 1980 Professor Smith went on sabbatical to work at GTE Laboratories in Waltham, Massachusetts to create a natural language interface to databases. At the end of his sabbatical he was offered a job at the Lab and he decided to stay and worked as Principal Member of the Technical Staff in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Three years later, in 1983, he was offered and accepted the positions of Professor of Computer Science and of the Director of its Graduate School at Northeastern University. There he taught Knowledge Representation and Inferencing, Natural Language Processing, Human-Computer Interface Design, Transaction Processing, and the Representation of Emotions. He did seminal work in the field of data structures for emotions. His administrative tasks included the design and implementation and functioning of the Masters and PhD programs.
During this period he co-authored Lexical-Semantic Relations: A Comparative Survey (1980) and wrote Dictionary of Artificial Intelligence (1989) as well as a variety of articles (over fifty in all) on the use of computers in natural language systems.
He served as Chairman of the Board of Cognitive Computers Corp, a start-up company dedicated to the development of expert systems in chemical analysis. He also served as a visiting professor of Information Engineering at Jilin University of Technology in Changchun in the People's Republic of China for four months during the summer of 1985. And he was co-administrator of the International Conference on Systems Dynamics in Shanghai, PRC in 1987.
Professor Smith was very active in his professional society the Association for Computing Machinery. He was co-founder of its Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction and chaired its first international conference, attended by over one thousand participants, in 1983.
He also served as an expert witness in five cases of alleged software patent infringement and as consultant on three natural language access to databases systems.
Professor Smith has travelled in over fifty countries and has lectured at Yale, Columbia, Stanford, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Korean Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology among many others.
Professor Smith retired from Northeastern in 2000. He immediately started working for the China Education Corporation whose task was to recruit and place highly qualified computer professionals from China in jobs in North America. He also taught English as a Second Language to Brazilian immigrants in his hometown. His retirement allowed him to continue his research on Jonathan Fisher and he published The Life of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847)--Volume I (from his Birth through the Year 1798) in 2006.
In 2010 he began to volunteer at the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, Massachusetts. There he functions as the Research Fellow, translating the Church Slavic texts on the icons and editing the Journal of Icon Studies which he founded.
In recognition of his outstanding contributions to his industry and the Marquis Who's Who community, Raoul Normand Smith, PhD, has been featured on the Marquis Who's Who Lifetime Achievers website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the First Edition of Who's Who in America , Marquis Who's Who has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Today, Who's Who in America remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms around the world. Marquis publications may be visited at the official Marquis Who's Who website at www.marquiswhoswho.com.
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