Dr. Elisa Barney Smith earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. She earned the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering in 1989 and 1998, respectively, also from RPI.
Dr. Barney Smith’s research is in image processing and pattern recognition. Her primary focus is on document image analysis. Her doctoral work focused on modeling and understanding document image degradations to improve document image analysis and recognition. For this work she earned an NSF CAREER award. She also does research on biomedical image processing, remote sensing and astronomical image processing. Her newest research focus is on Neuromorphic Computing. This work is collaborative with Drs. Campbell and Saxena.
From 1989 to 1993 Dr. Barney Smith worked as an engineer at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in New London, CT. In 1993, she had a research internship at the NATO SACLANT Centre in LaSpezia, Italy. Her work at both NUWC and SACLANT Centre involved designing automatic target classification algorithms and systems that utilize passive acoustic data.
Her sabbatical during the 2007-2008 academic year was spent primarily at Universität des Saarlandes (Saarland University) in Germany. In summer 2009 she was a visiting professor at LORIA in Nancy, France. She returned to France in summer 2012 as a visiting professor at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (Telecom ParisTech) in Paris.
Dr. Elisa Barney Smith joined the faculty at Boise State University in August 1999. Her previous academic experience includes being an adjunct faculty in the Computer Science Department at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Plattsburgh for the Spring of 1999 and at the Thames Valley State Technical College (now Three Rivers State Technical College) in Norwich, CT from 1992 to 1993. Dr. Barney Smith also earned secondary (7-12) teaching certification in Math and Physics for the State of New York.
Dr. Barney Smith is a member of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and SPIE (Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers). She was chair of the Boise section of IEEE from 2000-2003 and has been chair of IEEE’s Region 6, north-east area since January 2009.