Dr. Chris Riesbeck is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974. His dissertation was on natural language understanding.

He has done research on case-based reasoning, memory-based language understanding, and intelligent interfaces for knowledge acquisition and teaching. His current research is concerned with developing tools for authoring "thick" interfaces to interactive systems, especially learning environments.

Professor Riesbeck has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Semantics and Cognition in Switzerland and at the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California in San Diego, and was a research scientist in computer science at Yale University for 15 years.