Richard (Rick) Hull, Bell Labs Fellow, ACM Fellow, is a computer science researcher, practitioner and educator with extensive experience at both industrial research labs (IBM Research, Bell Labs) and research universities (primarily the University of Southern California). His industrial work has encompassed applications of AI in various areas including Business Process Management and Supply Chain management, the development of personalization technologies in telecommunications, and providing the advanced prototypes and foundations for products in the areas of modern Case Management, high-speed rules engines, and data integration. Hull was named Bell Labs Fellow in 2005, and named ACM Fellow in 2007, with a citation for "contributions to data semantics and web services". He received a Corporate Award from IBM in 2015 for his contributions in the area of Case Management, and also an “Outstanding Accomplishment” from IBM Research for “Fundamental Contributions to Science or Technology” in the area of data-aware processes. He holds 13 US patents.
Hull’s research has spanned from database theory and practice, to database programming languages, to web and telecommunications services, to Blockchain, to applying AI in several areas. He is currently interested in the area of applications of computing to the areas of agriculture, climate change, and food security. Hull has published over 150 refereed academic papers, and co-authored the book “Foundations of Databases” (1996). His academic research has been supported in part by grants from NSF, DARPA, AT&T and the European Union.
Hull's publications in Google Scholar
As one illustration of Hull’s research, in the latter 2010's his team at IBM Research developed prototypes that (a) apply natural language understanding to extract business process specifications from process manuals, (b) use process mining combined with natural language understanding to derive fine-grained descriptions of the processes running “on the ground”, and (c) apply visual and analytic tools to compare the two. In a larger project in the years around 2010, Hull and team developed and prototyped the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) Business Process Modeling framework, which became the foundation for the IBM Case Management product and the OMG Case Model and Management Notation (CMMN). The GSM and Case Management approaches were designed to maximize flexibility for knowledge workers, and provide rich opportunities for the incorporation of machine-learning-based decisions into the process flow, and more broadly for monitoring and tuning processes to maximize both operational and business objectives. Hull's research work on GSM and its underlying "business artifact model" for business processes was supported in part by a 3-year multi-partner EU-funded research grant, and led to an extensive body of research by the international community in the area of verification techniques for models that incorporate both process and data.
In recent years Hull co-founded a start-up, and has taught graduate Computer Science courses in Algorithms and Blockchain. Recently, he developed a course "Computing for Food Security" that looks at technologies for understanding and analyzing data about food production and trade, including potential impacts on and from climate change. Hull taught the course in the Computer Science department at the University of California, Davis, in the Spring 2023 semester.
Hull is also serving as President of the Board of Directors for the Spring Hills Foundation, a non-profit that focuses on providing educational programming for all ages in the areas of sustainable agriculture, environmentalism, and the Arts, all with an emphasis on experiential learning through an immersion into nature.
Brief Curriculum Vita:
2023: Visiting Scholar, Computer Science Department, UC Davis
2020-2021: CTO and co-founder of thegrok.io
2020: Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, NYU
2008- 2019: Senior Research Scientist, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
1996-2008: Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, rising to level of Director; Awarded Bell Labs Fellow 2006
1986-1994: Computer Science Department at University of Southern California, rising to level of tenured Associate Professor
Ph.D. in Mathematics (Formal Language Theory), UC Berkeley, 1979