Dr. Mark Smith shows that professors are people too

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Dr. Mark Smith shows that professors are people too

By Kim Wilson
Campus Life Staff

Electrical Engineering Professor Mark Smith is a man of many accomplishments. He was on the 1980 and 1984 US Olympic fencing teams, is an accomplished researcher and popular lecturer, a husband and a father of three, and has recently been appointed Executive Assistant to President Clough.

In this capacity, Professor Smith hopes to be `a bridge.'

"There are a lot of very creative ideas that are out there on campus, and there is a role to be played to try to get a lot of these ideas considered, refined, developed, and then implemented," he said.

Dr. Smith brings a unique perspective to the position; he is a Tech alumnus and a faculty member.

"One of the things I like to think I'll be doing is helping to provide some kind of input to school policies, to provide a faculty perspective and hopefully a student perspective on opportunities we will have in the future," stated Smith. "I think the opportunities we have, being a technical institution, are many. We have already made tremendous gains, and we're just beginning."

Professor Smith is currently researching methods to compress signals to make it possible to transmit video, images, and speech over a telephone line and reconstruct it with perfect or near-perfect quality. Another project his lab is working on is the synthesis of the human singing voice. They are trying to develop a computer "that will allow you to type in the lyrics to a piece and then the computer will synthesize a signal version of that," said Smith.

The professor is also doing work in telemedicine. He is trying "to develop systems that will allow you to send ultrasound video and medical images over the phone lines so you can have a kind of `distributed hospital'," where experts anywhere in the world would be able to share a medical record and have a three or four-way discussion about an individual who could be anywhere in the world.

He is also hoping to use these technologies with cellular phones to enable field workers to have consultations with experts while they are still in the field.

Smith feels that "it's important to maintain a healthy balance between teaching and research. I like to organize things so that they both feed off of each other and complement each other very well. What I really enjoy doing is teaching a class that I can connect with some of the research activities that are going on."

He likes to "write problems and teach about things that are right on the cutting edge," because "it's exciting for me, it's exciting for the students, and it makes my job very worthwhile."

The professor feels that the importance of interdisciplinary cooperation in research "cannot be underestimated." According to Smith, such cooperation "saves years of research" because scientists and engineers "don't have to re-invent the same thing over again."

Professor Smith feels that a creative engineer thinks about a problem in a different way than other people do. "The person who takes a completely different view from the commonly accepted one," said Smith, "may seem ridiculous at the outset, but will see something that everybody else in the world has missed. That's when you get a discovery."