Biographical Sketch & CV
Dr. Stephen V. Rice has enjoyed a 45-year career as a computer scientist and software developer. He has developed software systems that are popular (used by millions of people), long lasting (used for more than 20 years), and pioneering, with innovations in pattern recognition and artificial intelligence (AI); database systems and search technology; and computer algorithms. His work in AI has spanned 35 years. Currently at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, he develops genomics software for cancer research and diagnosis.
Dr. Rice's CV can be found here, last updated in February 2026.
Career History
In his 45-year career, Dr. Stephen V. Rice has worked as a computer scientist and software developer in industry and academia. His focus has been the design and implementation of advanced software systems.
After graduating at age 19 from Western Michigan University with a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, he earned a Master’s in Computer Science in 1981 from the University of Illinois. He then went to Silicon Valley, and by the age of 23, he had developed software products for both IBM and Oracle. He was the 40th employee of Oracle and the first Oracle employee with a graduate degree in computer science. (Today Oracle has 162,000 employees.)
Following an excursion to New Mexico where he taught computer programming to Navajos, he returned to industry with CACI in San Diego. There he worked on the development of simulation programming languages, Simscript and Modsim, including language design and compiler writing. He reprised this work in the early 2000s, collaborating with Simscript inventor and Nobel laureate Dr. Harry M. Markowitz on the design of Simscript III.
In 1991 Dr. Rice joined a research institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Tasked by the US Department of Energy to measure the accuracy of optical character recognition (OCR) systems, he developed innovative methodology and software for doing this, and he conducted five annual tests (competitions) of leading OCR systems from 1992 to 1996. These tests, which revealed the strengths and weaknesses of these systems, attracted international attention. They were the first large-scale, independent tests of OCR systems and among the first such tests of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In 1996 he was the first person to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Nevada. His software for OCR performance evaluation is still used today, and his book on OCR, published by Kluwer in 1999, is regarded as a classic in the field. His “voting” OCR system, which improved accuracy by combining multiple OCR systems, is an early example of ensemble learning in AI. He published his methodology in leading computer science journals, including Algorithmica and the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and his Ph.D. dissertation and OCR test reports are still cited after 30 years.
In Grass Valley, California, in 1997, Dr. Rice turned his attention to computer audio processing. There he invented an AI algorithm for comparing sounds, and it was the cornerstone of the technology firm he founded in 1998 named Comparisonics Corporation. Given any sound as input, the Comparisonics “sound-matching” algorithm can find similar sounds, on the Web and in audio databases. And it can monitor the sounds of any machine, to detect changes and anomalies. While others had developed methods for processing speech and music, his technology handled the rest of the sonic landscape.
In 2000 he launched FindSounds.com, the first web search engine for finding sound effects. Over its lifetime of 25+ years, it has been enjoyed by tens of millions of users worldwide. Unaffiliated with Google (which does not yet have an audio web search engine), FindSounds.com has been called “the Google for sounds.”
To better “see” sounds on computer screens, he invented a groundbreaking improvement: color the audio waveform display to show the frequency content of the audio signal. He patented this technique, and the Comparisonics colored waveform display is an integral component of FindSounds.com. This invention is a great aid to users of digital audio workstations, especially when editing audio.
Beginning in 2003, Dr. Rice helped the Computer Science department at the University of Mississippi. He taught a dozen graduate and undergraduate courses and mentored many students, and his students have gone on to fine careers in industry and academia.
Since 2015 he has worked in the Computational Biology department at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where he has developed software that is used for cancer research and diagnosis.