Biography: James E. Smith is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the past twenty five he has been involved with a number of computer research and development projects in both industry and academia. He has conducted research in high performance processor implementations, including branch prediction, instruction issuing methods, and precise interrupt techniques. He and his students have proposed and studied decoupled superscalar architectures, clustered microarchitectures, trace processors, and instruction level distributed processors.

Prof. Smith and his research group at the University of Wisconsin are currently studying the virtual machine abstraction as a technique for providing high performance and power efficiency through co-design and tight coupling of virtual machine hardware and software.