Richard Earl Fikes is a computer scientist, and is currently Professor (Research) Emeritus in the Computer Science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 department of Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 and professionally active as a consultant and expert witness. He led Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory from 1991 to 2006, and has held appointments at Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, Carnegie-Mellon, Price Waterhouse Technology Centre, Xerox PARC

Xerox PARC

PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....

, and SRI

SRI

Sri may refer to:*Sri, a Hindu honorific; not to be confused with Sir, a title of respect used in several modern contexts*Sri Lanka, an island state at the south tip of India, formerly called Ceylon*SRi, a car specification badge...

.

History

Prof. Fikes's research activities have primarily been in developing techniques for effectively representing and using knowledge in computer systems—a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence generally known as KR&R, for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. He was a co-developer of the STRIPS

STRIPS

In artificial intelligence, STRIPS is an automated planner developed by Richard Fikes and Nils Nilsson in 1971. The same name was later used to refer to the formal language of the inputs to this planner...

 automatic planning system, the KIF

KIF

KIF may stand for:* Knowledge Interchange Format* Kingfisher Lake Airport's IATA code* Københavns Idræts Forening, Denmark's oldest athletics club* KIF Kolding, a team handball club based in Kolding, Denmark...

 (Knowledge Interchange Format) language for interchange of logical knowledge bases, the Ontolingua ontology engineering environment, and IntelliCorp's

IntelliCorp

IntelliCorp is a name used by multiple corporations:*IntelliCorp , provider of SAP application lifecycle management software.*IntelliCorp , provider of employee background checks for employment and other purposes....

  Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE)

KEE

KEE is a frame-based development tool for Expert Systems. KEE was developed and sold by IntelliCorp. It was first released in 1983 and ran on Lisp Machines. KEE was later ported to Lucid Common Lisp with CLX...

. He also worked on the Shakey the Robot

Shakey the Robot

Shakey the Robot was the first general-purpose mobile robot to be able to reason about its own actions. While other robots would have to be instructed on each individual step of completing a larger task, Shakey could analyze the command and break it down into basic chunks by itself...

project at SRI. Prof. Fikes received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1968.

Prof. Fikes has published numerous articles in journals and conference proceedings, and has also served as editor of several professional journals in Artificial Intelligence and related areas. Prof. Fikes has also chaired, co-chaired, organized, or served on the program committee of numerous professional conferences and symposia.