{"id":2163,"date":"2026-08-24T10:00:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T09:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/?p=2163"},"modified":"2026-08-20T11:05:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T10:05:24","slug":"parade-profile-melvyn-smith-beng-mechanical-engineering-1987","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/2026\/08\/24\/parade-profile-melvyn-smith-beng-mechanical-engineering-1987\/","title":{"rendered":"Parade Profile: Melvyn Smith (BEng Mechanical Engineering 1987)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Melvyn's career traces the rise of AI. After studying Mechanical Engineering, he moved through toolmaking and robotics research into a distinguished academic career. His current project? Using AI to detect stress and emotion in animals, starting with pigs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why did you choose to study at Bath?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The strong reputation of the Mechanical Engineering course, and the opportunity to live in a beautiful city.<\/p>\n

Did you have a particular career in mind when you chose your course?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was already working for an engineering company, Bensons, and able to attend university as a thick sandwich student. I will be eternally grateful to that company for sponsoring me. Actually, Bensons provided the group project in the final year of my undergraduate course.<\/p>\n

Can you tell us about your experience of studying here? Any favourite memories, or places to go on campus and in the city?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It took me a while to make good friends, but in my final year, I did, and I have fond memories of that time. I very much enjoyed exploring the city and the surrounding areas (including abandoned old\"\"<\/a> railway lines such as the Midford rail station line, which had almost disappeared back into nature) on my bicycle, both with them and on my own.<\/p>\n

Describe your career journey since graduating. What is a typical day like in your current role?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I worked for Bensons for almost 10 years, initially as a toolmaking apprentice, then later in their Research and Development department, working on new kinds of automated systems for manufacturing and assembling small metal parts.<\/p>\n

I then undertook an MSc in Automation and Robotics at Cranfield, followed by a period at Bristol University, where I conducted research on dexterous anthropomorphic artificial hands and took some early steps towards my later work in machine vision.<\/p>\n

After that, I moved to the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL). BRL is a joint venture between Bristol University and the University of the West of England (UWE), where I became UWE Professor of Machine Vision and, together with two colleagues, I formed the Centre for Machine Vision.<\/p>\n

I am now semi-retired and part-time, but a typical day might involve helping my students with their projects, planning a research project meeting with academic and industrial partners, or learning new things to stay abreast of the latest developments in my discipline.<\/p>\n

What do you enjoy most about your career?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I enjoy working with bright and talented people \u2013 much cleverer than I am. I also enjoy the freedom an academic career can offer. Over the years, I have worked across several areas and disciplines, including industrial inspection, security\/defence, medicine, and, most recently, agricultural technology. This can make life interesting and quite rewarding, especially when you feel you have created something novel or helped a colleague or student.<\/p>\n

Most recently, I have been working on ways AI might recognise emotional states in animals. So far, we have shown that deep learning can recognise whether pigs are stressed, which is important for ensuring their welfare and potentially much more.<\/p>\n

I am currently writing a student textbook with the publisher Taylor & Francis entitled \u201cCan machines learn to read the emotions of animals?\u201d<\/p>\n

Has anything surprised you along the way?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I never ceased to be surprised by what modern AI can do.<\/p>\n

In my own research discipline of machine vision, just a few years ago, recognising a human face under real-world conditions was a challenge. Today, AI can recognise individual animals, detect their physical condition, and perhaps soon even tell us something about how they are feeling.<\/p>\n

How did your studies help to develop you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My studies at Bath, especially laboratory and later project work, helped me understand the scientific method \u2013 how to approach a problem and work towards a solution. The final year project offered a particular case in point. Our task was to develop a more flexible manufacturing process for producing punched metal components. The team developed a novel flexible manufacturing system (FMS) that used a new form of tooling composed of separate units that could be reconfigured programmatically to stamp out different designs. It was very different to traditional fixed (progression) tooling commonly used at the time. It was great to see the whole team work together, with each subgroup focusing on a different aspect of the project. I learnt a lot.<\/p>\n

If you could go back in time to when you were a Bath student, how would you spend 24 hours?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Did something like this not happen in the 2001 film AI?!\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Apart from taking more photos, I think I would spend such a day worrying less about getting everything right, and more time enjoying the people and moments of university life that I could never relive.<\/p>\n

What advice would you give to prospective students thinking about studying your course at Bath?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It might be a clich\u00e9, but my best advice is to be persistent and not give up. My career has often required me to write grant applications to fund the research projects I am most interested in. This can be very competitive and so often unsuccessful. That can be pretty demoralising, and I have known many to give up and change careers. However, I have found that by trying not to be demoralised, but instead to learn from the experience, it can eventually pay off and make all the hard work worthwhile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Melvyn's career traces the rise of AI. After studying Mechanical Engineering, he moved through toolmaking and robotics research into a distinguished academic career. His current project? Using AI to detect stress and emotion in animals, starting with pigs. Why did...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2002,"featured_media":2164,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[123,126,119],"tags":[5,95],"class_list":["post-2163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ddar-staff-spotlight","category-engineering-design","category-parade-profiles","tag-alumni","tag-engineering"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/48\/2026\/08\/Parade-profile-header-62.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/on-parade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}