Dr Michael Smith

About

Dr Michael Smith currently works at the intersection of (flying) insect behaviour ecology and computer science, in particular on the development of methods to track their location and behaviour in the landscape.This depends on the development of tags and machine learning techniques for efficient sampling and handling of the sparse data the tags collect, as the bee flys across the landscape.Previous work focused on the probabilistically handling calibration of air pollution sensors using mobile PM2.5 sensors (transported by motorbike taxis in Kampala), and the problem of source-inference in the resulting datasets. He also worked in the field of Differential Privacy and its applications to Gaussian process (GP) regression and classification and developed an approach to bound all future attac

Selected publications

• Yao M, Smith M & Peng C (2025) Modelling the effects of vegetation and urban form on air quality in real urban environments: A systematic review of measurements, methods, and predictions. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 105. View this article in WRRO
• Chapman KE, Smith MT, Gaston KJ & Hempel de Ibarra N (2024) Bumblebee nest departures under low light conditions at sunrise and sunset. Biology Letters, 20(4). View this article in WRRO
• Smith MT, Ross M, Ssematimba J, Álvarez MA, Bainomugisha E & Wilkinson R (2023) Modelling calibration uncertainty in networks of environmental sensors. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C: Applied Statistics, 72(5), 1187-1209. View this article in WRRO
• Smith MT, Grosse K, Backes M & Álvarez MA (2023) Adversarial vulnerability bounds for Gaussian process classification. Machine Learning, 112(3), 971-1009. View this article in WRRO
• Smith MT, Livingstone M & Comont R (2021) A method for low‐cost, low‐impact insect tracking using retroreflective tags. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 12(11), 2184-2195.
• Smith MT, Alvarez MA & Lawrence ND (2021) Differentially private regression and classification with sparse Gaussian processes. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 22. View this article in WRRO
• Fotheringham J, Smith MT, Froissart M, Kronenberg F, Stenvinkel P, Floege J, Eckardt K-U & Wheeler DC (2020) Hospitalization and mortality following non-attendance for hemodialysis according to dialysis day of the week : a European cohort study. BMC Nephrology, 21(1). View this article in WRRO
• Smith MT, Zwiessele M & Lawrence ND (2016) Differentially Private Gaussian Processes.. CoRR, abs/1606.00720.
• Bett D, Stevenson CH, Shires KL, Smith MT, Martin SJ, Dudchenko PA & Wood ER (2013) The Postsubiculum and Spatial Learning: The Role of Postsubicular Synaptic Activity and Synaptic Plasticity in Hippocampal Place Cell, Object, and Object-Location Memory. The Journal of Neuroscience, 33(16), 6928-6943.
• Feldwisch-Drentrup H, Barrett AB, Smith MT & van Rossum MCW (2012) Fluctuations in the open time of synaptic channels: An application to noise analysis based on charge. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 210(1), 15-21.