View source for Biography:James F. Allen (computer scientist)

{{short description|American computer scientist and linguist}}

{{Infobox scientist
| name              = James Frederick Allen
| image             =
| caption           = James Allen
| birth_date        = {{birth year and age|1950}}
| birth_place       = 
| citizenship       = 
| nationality       = 
| fields            = Artificial Intelligence<br>Natural Language Processing & Understanding<br>Computational Linguistics
| workplaces        = [[Organization:University of Rochester|University of Rochester]]<br>[[Organization:Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition|IHMC]]
| alma_mater        = [[Organization:University of Toronto|University of Toronto]] (Ph.D., 1979)
| thesis_title      = A plan-based approach to speech act recognition
| thesis_url        = http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=909217
| thesis_year       = 1979
| doctoral_advisor  = 
| academic_advisors = [[Biography:C. Raymond Perrault|C. Raymond Perrault]]
| doctoral_students = 
| notable_students  = Garrison Cottrell<br/>[[Biography:Henry Kautz|Henry Kautz]]<br/>[[Biography:Diane Litman|Diane Litman]]
| known_for         = TRIPS (An Integrated Intelligent Problem-Solving Assistant) <br> PLOW (A Collaborative Task Learning Agent)
| author_abbrev_bot = 
| author_abbrev_zoo = 
| influences        = 
| influenced        = 
| awards            = [[Organization:Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence|AAAI]] Fellow (1990, Founding) <ref name=aaai-fellow-90>[http://www.aaai.org/Awards/fellows-list.php  AAAI FELLOWS]</ref>
| signature         = 
| footnotes         = 
| website           = {{URL|https://www.cs.rochester.edu/~james/}} 
}}

'''James Frederick Allen''' (born 1950) is a computational linguist recognized for his contributions to [[Philosophy:Temporal logic|temporal logic]], in particular [[Allen's interval algebra]]. He is interested in [[Knowledge representation and reasoning|knowledge representation]], [[Commonsense reasoning|commonsense reasoning]], and natural language understanding, believing that ''"deep language understanding can only currently be achieved by significant hand-engineering of semantically-rich formalisms coupled with statistical preferences"''.<ref name=homepage>[https://www.cs.rochester.edu/~james/ James F. Allen homepage on Rochester]</ref> He is the John H. Dessaurer Professor of Computer Science at the [[Organization:University of Rochester|University of Rochester]]<ref>[http://www.ling.rochester.edu/cls_faculty.html Faculty listing] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100625181234/http://www.ling.rochester.edu/cls_faculty.html |date=2010-06-25 }}, linguistics department, Rochester University, retrieved 2011-01-05.</ref>

==Biography==
Allen received his Ph.D. from the [[Organization:University of Toronto|University of Toronto]] in 1979, under the supervision of [[Biography:C. Raymond Perrault|C. Raymond Perrault]],<ref name="acm">[http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=909217 ACM Digital Library entry] for Allen's thesis, ''A plan-based approach to speech act recognition'', retrieved 2011-01-05.</ref><ref name="aigp">[http://aigp.eecs.umich.edu/researcher/show/250 AI Genealogy Project] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110720091212/http://aigp.eecs.umich.edu/researcher/show/250 |date=2011-07-20 }}, retrieved 2011-01-05.</ref><ref name="mgp">{{mathgenealogy|id=29279|name=James Francis Allen}}.</ref> after which he joined the faculty at Rochester.<ref name="cv">[http://www.futurehealth.rochester.edu/directory/CVs/jamesallen.pdf Curriculum vitae] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060906163846/http://www.futurehealth.rochester.edu/directory/CVs/jamesallen.pdf |date=2006-09-06 }}, retrieved 2011-01-05.</ref> At Rochester, he was department chair from 1987 to 1990, directed the Cognitive Science Program from 1992 to 1996, and co-directed the Center for the Sciences of Language from 1996 to 1998.<ref name="cv"/> He served as the Editor-in-Chief of ''Computational Linguistics'' from 1983–1993.<ref name="cv"/><ref>[http://www.aclweb.org/archive/misc/History.html Some Notes on ACL History], Karen Sparck Jones, 2002, retrieved 2011-01-05.</ref><ref>[http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/docs/cl.html Computational Linguistics] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110527031136/http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/docs/cl.html |date=2011-05-27 }}, Julia Hirschberg, 2002, retrieved 2011-01-05.</ref> Since 2006 he has also been associate director of the [[Organization:Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition|Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition]].<ref name="cv"/><ref>[http://www.ihmc.us/groups/jallen/ Profile at IHMC, retrieved 2011-01-06.]</ref>

==Academic life==
===TRIPS project===
The TRIPS project is a long-term research to build generic technology for dialogue (both spoken and 'chat') systems, which includes [[Natural language processing|natural language processing]], collaborative problem solving, and dynamic [[Context-sensitive language|context-sensitive language]] modeling. This is contrast with the data driven approaches by [[Machine learning|machine learning]], which requires to collect and annotate corpora, i.e. training data,  firstly.<ref>[http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/cisd/pubs/1998/ferguson-allen-aaai98.pdf TRIPS: An Integrated Intelligent Problem-Solving Assistant], AAAI'98</ref>

===PLOW agent===
PLOW agent is a system that learns executable task models from a single collaborative learning session, which integrates wide AI technologies including deep natural language understanding, [[Knowledge representation and reasoning|knowledge representation and reasoning]], dialogue systems, planning/agent-based systems, and [[Machine learning|machine learning]]. This paper won the outstanding paper award at AAAI in 2007.<ref>[http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/cisd/pubs/2007/allen-et-al-plow-aaai2007.pdf PLOW: A Collaborative Task Learning Agent], AAAI'07</ref>

==Selected works==
===Books===
Allen is the author of the textbook ''Natural Language Understanding'' (Benjamin-Cummings, 1987; 2nd ed., 1995).<ref>[http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J88/J88-4010.pdf Review by Michael Kac] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110629122019/http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J88/J88-4010.pdf |date=2011-06-29 }} (1988), ''Computational Linguistics'' '''14''' (4): 96–97.</ref><ref>[Review by Mona Singh] (1996), ''[[ACM Computing Reviews]]''.</ref>

He is also the co-author with [[Biography:Henry Kautz|Henry Kautz]], Richard Pelavin, and Josh Tenenberg of ''Reasoning About Plans'' (Morgan Kaufmann, 1991).<ref>Review by Mitchell Marks and Kristian J. Hammond (1993), ''ACM SIGART Bulletin'' '''4''' (2): 8–11, {{doi|10.1145/152941.1064726}}.</ref>

===Articles===
* 2007. ''PLOW: A Collaborative Task Learning Agent''. (with Nathanael Chambers et al) [http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/cisd/pubs/2007/allen-et-al-plow-aaai2007.pdf AAAI'07]
: won the outstanding paper award at AAAI in 2007.
* 2006. ''Chester: Towards a Personal Medication Advisor''. (with N. Blaylock, et al) [http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/cisd/pubs/2006/allen-ferguson-et-al-chester-biomedical-informatics-2006.pdf Biomedical informatics 39(5)]
* 1998. ''TRIPS: An Integrated Intelligent Problem-Solving Assistant''. (with George Ferguson) [http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/cisd/pubs/1998/ferguson-allen-aaai98.pdf AAAI'98]
* 1983. ''Maintaining Knowledge about Temporal Intervals''. [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358434 CACM 26, 11, 832-843]

==Awards and honors==
In 1991 he was elected as a fellow of the [[Organization:Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence|Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence]] (1990, founding fellow).<ref name=aaai-fellow-90 /><ref>{{citation|title=Fellows of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence|journal=AI Magazine|pages=13–14| volume=11| issue=4| year=1990| url=http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/download/864/782}}</ref>

In 1992 he became the Dessaurer Professor at [[Organization:University of Rochester|Rochester]].<ref name="cv"/>

==References==
{{reflist|colwidth=30em}}

==External links==
* [http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~james/ James F. Allen's Home Page]
* [https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FzzeDG4AAAAJ&hl=en Google Scholar], [[H-index|h-index]] is 59.


{{DEFAULTSORT:Allen, James F.}}
[[Category:American computer scientists]]
[[Category:Artificial intelligence researchers]]
[[Category:Computational linguistics researchers]]
[[Category:Natural language processing researchers]]

{{Sourceattribution|James F. Allen (computer scientist)}}