Richard Earl Fikes (of San Antontio, TX, and born 4 October 1942), is a computer scientist, and is currently Professor (Research) Emeritus in the Computer Science department of Stanford University[1] 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, Carnegie-Mellon, Price Waterhouse Technology Centre, Xerox PARC, and SRI.
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 automatic planning system, the KIF (Knowledge Interchange Format) language for interchange of logical knowledge bases, the Ontolingua ontology engineering environment, and IntelliCorp's Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE). He also worked on the Shakey the Robot 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.