Elaine A. Rich

Elaine Rich received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon in 1979.  Her thesis, Building and Exploiting User Models, laid the groundwork for the next twenty years of work on personalizing information systems to meet the needs of individual users.  Over twenty years later, she still gets requests for her thesis and the papers based on it.

Dr. Rich joined the UT CS faculty in 1979.  She continued her work in the area of human/machine interfaces, with a focus on the use of knowledge-based systems.  She was PI on an NSF grant, "Individual Models in Computer Systems", $56,000, NSF, 1980, which supported that work.  She was also co-PI on two other grants while at UT: "An Experimental Computing Facility to Support the Design and Analysis of Reliable, High Performance Computing Systems", with J. C. Browne, A. G. Dale, D. I. Good, and A. Silberschatz, $3,700,000, NSF, 1982 and "Support for an AI Laboratory", with G. Novak, R. Simmons, and V. Kumar, $1,300,000, Army Research Office, 1984.  The $3.7M NSF grant is particularly significant.  It supported, for the first time in our department's history, a significant investment in the computing and networking infrastructure required to enable research groups to cooperate in work that required building large software systems.