James Smith is currently engaged in an effort to understand, and then replicate, the computing paradigm(s) used in the brain’s neocortex. This effort is framed as a computer architecture research problem: Reverse-Architecting the Brain’s Neocortex.

As part of that effort, he is an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley, co-leading the Neuromorphic Computer Architecture Laboratory with Professor John Shen.