Dr Ashley Smith is a research assistant in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He carried out his PhD under the supervision of Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Dr Les Carr, following his Masters degree from the University of Portsmouth and his Batchelors degree from Southampton. Ash has previously worked in industry as a software developer as well as a freelance web programmer and designer, and has a keen interest in the Semantic Web and Knowledge Management technologies.

The process of writing Ash's thesis involved as much practical development as it did theory, and during its course he developed a Life Annotation system, designed to collect snippets of raw contextual data from both the physical and digital worlds, and link them together in a local server, allowing relevant information digests to be generated based on the user's actions. His work in this area is still ongoing; he develops software for a variety of different platforms, desktop, server and mobile, and often uses himself as a test subject.