Rich's research included the Collagen/Disco collaborative dialog manager, an effort at developing and using tools for managing dialog based on the Grosz, Sidner, Lochbaum, Kraus theory of dialog and collaboration; the development in 1995 of the MERL Diamond Park, a social virtual reality world using networked computers; and his most recent work with Sonia Chernova, Dmitry Berenson, Anahita MohseniKabir, and Candy Sidner, which permits the simultaneous learning by a robot of low level primitive actions and
hierarchical task networks with minimal demonstrations.