Elaine Kant is an American computer scientist known for her work in artificial intelligence, program synthesis, and computational finance.
Kant earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. Her 1979 doctoral dissertation was Efficiency Considerations in Program Synthesis: A Knowledge-Based Approach.
Kant was a computer science faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University in the early 1980s.As a researcher for Schlumberger in the 1980s and 1990s, she developed SciNapse, a tool for transforming mathematical models in hydrocarbon exploration into computer code. She later founded SciComp, which developed a system for automatic programming in computational finance.
She is president and CEO of SciComp, chief scientist of Querium, and head of research for StepWise, an online secondary-school mathematics tutoring system developed by Querium.
As a doctoral student, Kant received a Hertz Fellowship in 1976. She was named a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1991, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1997.
Kant is the author of Efficiency in Program Synthesis (1981). She is a coauthor of the 1985 book Programming Expert Systems in OPS5: An Introduction to Rule-Based Programming, on OPS5, a rule-based language.