Rate My Professor Lech Szymanski

Lech Szymanski is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science within the School of Computing at the University of Otago. He earned his PhD from the University of Otago in 2012 with a thesis titled "Deep architectures and classification by intermediary transformations." He also holds an MSc from the University of Ottawa. Before pursuing his doctorate, Szymanski worked as a software engineer for a wireless telecommunications company in Ottawa, Canada. His interest in artificial neural network models originated during undergraduate summer employment at the National Research Council Canada, developing programs for data analysis in a neurobiology laboratory. His professional background includes computer and electrical engineering, with experience in embedded programming, digital signal processing, speech recognition, classification, learning theory, and object recognition from images.

Szymanski's research focuses on machine learning, deep representation and connectionist models, convolutional neural networks, reinforcement learning, support vector machines, and learning theory. He develops autonomous machine learning algorithms that form appropriate models independently, without requiring expert specification of architecture, parameters, or representations. Key publications include "Pseudo-rehearsal: Achieving deep reinforcement learning without catastrophic forgetting" (Atkinson, McCane, Szymanski, and Robins, Neurocomputing, 2021), "Deep Networks are Effective Encoders of Periodicity" (Szymanski and McCane, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2014), "Sequential Learning in the Dense Associative Memory" (McAlister, Robins, and Szymanski, Neural Computation, 2025), "Prototype Analysis in Hopfield Networks with Hebbian Learning" (McAlister, Robins, and Szymanski, Neural Computation, 2024), "Conceptual complexity of neural networks" (Szymanski, McCane, and Atkinson, Neurocomputing, 2022), and "Image Segmentation with a Deep Declarative Network" (Szymanski, Mills, Wales, and McAlister, Proceedings of IVCNZ, 2024). He teaches courses including COSC343 Artificial Intelligence, COSC420 Neural Networks, and COSC360 Computer Game Design, and is a member of the Otago AI Group.