At the beginning of 2016 IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) , the umbrella organization for national computer societies worldwide (such as ACM, IEEE, BCS), formed a new working group under Technical Committee 1 (Foundations of Computer Science). The group is
WG1.10: String Algorithmics & Applications
This is Dr. Smyth's area of research, as it is also in part that of three other CAS members: Antoine Deza, Franya Franek, and Pat Ryan. There are two official positions for the new Working Group:
Costas Iliopoulos of King' College London is Chair
Bill Smyth is Secretary.
The working group represents perhaps 2-3 thousand researchers world-wide, and has many applications in computational biology.
For the three-year period 2014-2017 Dr. Smyth has been named Sir Walter Murdoch Distinguished Collaborator in the School of Engineering & Information Technology at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. The appointment includes an annual reimbursement of AUD$10,000 for travel expenses to Murdoch and to conferences at which he presented papers joint with collaborators from Murdoch.
At the end of 2014, he cofounded the Centre for Combinatorics on Words & Applications (CCCWA) with Amy Glen and Jamie Simpson of Murdoch University. It currently has about 40 members, all distinguished researchers from all over the world, including also Dr. Franya Franek from our department. In October 2015 it held a StringMasters meeting and it is developing an Unsolved Problems webpage that will provide problem descriptions and partial solutions for problems submitted by researchers.