William Smyth

Dr William Smyth is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Mathematics at the Intelligent Systems Research Centre, Ulster University. He holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics (quantum optics) and a BSc in Mathematics from Queen’s University Belfast, and has over twenty-five years of experience in further and higher education.

Dr Smyth specialises in the application of machine learning in finance, with research spanning quantitative finance, sustainable investing, and interpretable AI. His work has been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Finance Research Letters, Quantitative Finance, Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, Journal of Modern Optics, and Optics Communications.

Dr Smyth has received awards for both research and teaching excellence, most recently in 2023. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a committee member of the Irish Branch of the IMA. He is renowned for his innovative use of active and interactive learning in mathematics education, having led national curriculum development projects in Northern Ireland and collaborated with the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics in England. He also created a full adult numeracy curriculum for financial awareness—the first of its kind in the UK—on behalf of the then Department for Employment and Learning (DEL), Northern Ireland Government.

At Ulster University, Dr Smyth has led major curriculum innovations. As Course Director of the newly evaluated BSc (Hons) in Computing with Applied Mathematics, he developed and implemented a cutting-edge applied mathematics curriculum designed to underpin contemporary computing education. This curriculum embeds modern mathematical methods directly relevant to machine learning and artificial intelligence, forming a robust mathematical pillar within one of the university’s most highly rated computing degrees in the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems.

In 2019, he was instrumental in the creation of the first undergraduate higher-level apprenticeship degree in Financial Technology in the UK and Ireland—an industry-aligned programme combining academic rigour with work-based learning.

Dr Smyth’s recent research with Nobel Laureate Harry Markowitz modernised classical portfolio theory by introducing Markowitz-Informed Neural Networks (MINNs)—an interpretable machine learning architecture for portfolio optimisation. MINNs avoid the black-box nature of traditional AI by generating transparent covariance structures, marrying statistical clarity with cutting-edge performance. Dr Smyth is also the creator of IQ, the robust co-movement measure underpinning the widely adopted covariance matrix estimation technique known as “squeezing”.

In addition to his academic work, Dr Smyth serves as a consultant to Prime Value Capital Management, a Dublin-based international private equity firm. His broader research interests also include the role of machine learning in sustainable finance, particularly in evaluating firms’ preparedness for long-term value creation in the shift from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism.

Earlier in his career, Dr Smyth led an engineering department in a large further education college, making it the first in the UK to offer Hydrogen Safety Engineering and achieve Centre of Excellence status. He pioneered project-based learning based on the CDIO model and developed a full engineering apprenticeship pathway from RQF Level 2 to Level 6. His model was subsequently recommended by the Education and Training Inspectorate (ETI) as an exemplar for apprenticeship-based engineering education.