Academic X’cellence: Sharing stories from our inspiring StFX community
It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with StFX that our campus is filled with highly engaged students, educators, researchers, and leaders. Academic X’cellence shines a spotlight on members of our educational community to find out more about their unique experiences—both inside and outside of the classroom. (To see the full series, please click HERE.)
Here we meet Dr. Taylor Smith, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and the director of the FLAReLab, the Formal Languages and Automata Research Lab at StFX. Dr. Smith’s teaching and research focuses on theoretical computer science and through his work, he strives to spark a lifelong curiosity that encourages his students to dig deeper and think not just about the how,’ but also about the ‘why.’ Dr. Smith’s research is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant, and all of the students he has supervised have received research funding.
Dr. Taylor Smith: Drawing connection between theory and the rest of computer science
“Teaching at StFX doesn't just happen in a lecture hall: it happens in conversations during office hours, in hallways, and even walking across campus. Having these meaningful interactions with my students and colleagues makes my job all the more exciting.”
Tell us about yourself.
I was born and raised in London, ON, and I earned my bachelor's degree from Western University. I went to the University of Waterloo for my master's degree, followed by Queen's University in Kingston, ON, for my doctorate. I joined the faculty at StFX in 2021, right after earning my doctorate (and in the midst of the pandemic, no less!) My teaching focus is theoretical computer science, so my courses cover topics like algorithm design and analysis, computational complexity theory, formal logic, and so on. My research specialty is formal languages and automata theory. I often describe an automaton as what you get if you take a computer and strip away all of the real-world parts, so that you're only focused on what problems the machine is capable of solving. Similarly, a formal language is like a description of what a specific automaton computes.
Could you talk about your teaching philosophy?
There was once a talk delivered by a famous computer scientist, Donald Knuth, where he said that "the best theory is inspired by practice and the best practice is inspired by theory." I'm aware that many students think of theoretical computer science as a dry subject, especially since it's one of the few computer science courses where students aren't expected to write any code or even use a computer at all! In my teaching, then, I try to draw plenty of connections between theory and the rest of computer science, with the hope that students will discover how theory underpins all of the applications that they learn about in the rest of their degree program.
My current and former students can attest that I also love to take historical diversions during lectures, describing how a concept was developed and talking about the people who made the discoveries that we study in class. Sometimes, the ideas we talk about have fascinating backstories: for example, one of the most important results in computational complexity theory was developed independently, at almost exactly the same time, by a researcher in North America and by a researcher in the USSR, and neither one knew about the other's work due to the state of the world with the Cold War!
What impact do you hope your teaching will have?
Aside from the obvious impact I hope to have - creating a new generation of theorists! - I hope that my students leave my courses with a better appreciation for the beautiful and deep results in theoretical computer science, and how these results have an influence on computer science and fields beyond. I understand that some students may take only one theory-oriented course in their entire degree program, so in that course I hope to spark a lifelong curiosity that encourages students to dig deeper and think not just about the how,’ but also about the ‘why.’ It's one thing to try and write efficient code to solve a difficult problem; it's an entirely different thing to identify when a problem is intractable, and no efficient code exists to solve it!
Tell us about any innovations in your classrooms or research front? You are director of the FLAReLab. Tell us more.
FLAReLab is the Formal Languages and Automata Research Lab, which I established at StFX shortly after I arrived. I have a handful of theoretical computer science colleagues at universities in Atlantic Canada with whom I collaborate, and my aim is for FLAReLab to be a hub of theory research for people within the region and beyond. We're well situated on the east coast, too, as quite a lot of work on formal languages and automata theory is done by researchers on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in places like Finland, Germany, Italy, and Slovakia. I hope that FLAReLab can also act as the bridge between my Canadian colleagues and my European colleagues.
Beyond research, I've made some educational innovations in my time at StFX. Most recently, I polished up the lecture notes I created for my Theory of Computing course and produced an open educational resource book titled "Theory of Computing: An Open Introduction." It's completely free to access, and it's released under an open Creative Commons license. I plan to release regular updates and additions to the book with the aim being to create a resource useful not just for my own students, but for all students and educators around the world.
Are there other awards, accomplishments or involvements?
For one, I'm proud to say that every undergraduate student I've had the pleasure of supervising has been supported by the StFX Alley Heaps endowment fund, as well as by additional research funds through sources such as the StFX University Council for Research and the Canada Summer Jobs grant. My students' hard work has been recognized in other ways, too: at a past edition of the Science Atlantic Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science conference, one of my students received the Computer Science Communication Award for their research talk, and their work appeared in a journal article this past summer.
My own work is currently supported by an NSERC Discovery grant, which gives me the funding to promote my research at international conferences and to host visiting researchers at FLAReLab. It also gives me the funding to hire promising new theorists as graduate students - and yes, FLAReLab is seeking graduate applicants right now, so please feel free to get in touch if you're interested!
What drew you to teaching, and at the post-secondary level?
For almost my entire life, I knew that I wanted to be involved in teaching in some capacity (except when I was around four years old and wanted to be a train engineer instead). My focus shifted as I got older: when I was in grade school, I wanted to teach grade school; when I was in high school, I wanted to teach high school; and when I was in university, I wanted to become a professor. Ultimately, I was drawn to teaching at the post-secondary level because not only do I get to educate and mentor students on a subject about which I'm passionate, but I also get to learn every day by keeping up with the research literature and conversing with other experts. And in a field like computer science, where the state-of-the-art changes monthly or even weekly, there's a lot of keeping-up to do.
What excites you about teaching at StFX?
In the past, I've taught courses with hundreds of students, multiple sections, and an entire team of support staff, and I never found that model of education to be particularly rewarding. At StFX, on the other hand, I know all of my students' names in each of my classes, and I get to interact with them in a way that simply isn't possible at a big university. Teaching at StFX doesn't just happen in a lecture hall: it happens in conversations during office hours, in hallways, and even walking across campus. Having these meaningful interactions with my students and colleagues makes my job all the more exciting.
What’s something surprising about yourself that people wouldn’t know?
I compete in 10 metre air pistol shooting - the same event that you might have seen at the Olympics. After a long day on campus, it's rather calming to clear my mind and focus on hitting a bullseye smaller in size than a dime!
