Richard Fikes

Richard Earl Fikes (of San Antontio, TX, and born 4 October 1942), is a prominent computer scientist, and is currently Professor (Research) Emeritus in the Computer Science department of Stanford University. He led Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory from 1991 to 2006, and during a long and distinguished career in both academia and industry held appointments at Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Price Waterhouse Technology Centre, Xerox PARC, and SRI.

Career Summary

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 -- and he was an important figure in the emergence of this discipline of study. He is particularly well-known as co-developer of the STRIPS automatic planning system, and the KIF (Knowledge Interchange Format) language for interchange of logical knowledge bases. Early in his career, he also worked on the Shakey_the_Robot project at SRI.

Career highlights

Prof. Fikes served as Principal Investigator and/or Project Lead or Co-Lead of the following (selected) projects:

* Interoperable Knowledge Representation for Intelligence Support (IKRIS) -- An investigation in enabling interoperability of KR&R technologies in application to intelligence analysis tasks, with the goal of enhancing automated support for analysts.

* Knowledge Associates for Novel Intelligence – Sponsored by the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) as part of the Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD) program.

* Tools for DAML-Based Services, Document Templates, and Query-Answering – Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program.

* AQUAINT Question Answering (AQUA) System – Sponsored by ARDA as part of their Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence (AQUAINT) program.

* Representation, Reasoning, and Explanation Technology for a Cognitive Assistant – Sponsored by DARPA as part of their Perceptive Assistant that Learns (PAL) program.

* Open Knowledge Base Connectivity (OKBC) -- and API for knowledge servers.

* Compositional Modeling Language (CML).

* Ontolingua -- an ontology development environment.

* Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) with Michael Genesereth.

* The Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver (STRIPS), an automatic planning system developed in the early 1970's, generally considered to have provided a seminal framework for attacking the "classical planning problem". The STRIPS papers are some of the most frequently cited and reprinted in the Artificial Intelligence literature.

Prof. Fikes was elected a Founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Professional Involvement

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 gatherings.

Other

Prof. Fikes received his B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1963, his M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1965, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1968.

Prof. Fikes is reportedly an accomplished amateur SCUBA-diver, logging over $2^8$ dives.