James F. Allen

James Frederick Allen (* 1950 ) is an American computer scientist and linguist .

Career

Allen received his doctorate in 1979 from the University of Toronto under C. Raymond Perrault (A plan-based approach to speech act recognition). In 1979 he became Assistant Professor, 1984 Associate Professor and 1987 Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester , where he headed the Computer Science Faculty from 1987 to 1990 and was John H. Dessauer Professor from 1992 . From 2002 he was Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (and from 2006 its co-director).

He deals with the processing and understanding of natural language and dialogue systems (including the TRIPS project). He also deals with knowledge representation, planning, temporal logic ( Allen calculus ) and commonsense reasoning.

From 1983 to 1993 he was editor of Computational Linguistics . He received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the NSF and is a fellow of the AAAI .

Fonts (selection)

• Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals, Communications of the ACM, Volume 26, No. 11, 1983, pp. 832-843
• Natural Language Understanding, Benjamin Cummings 1987, 2nd edition 1995
• with Henry Kautz , R. Pelavin, J. Tenenberg: Reasoning About Plans, Morgan Kaufmann, 1991
• as editor with others: Readings in Planning, Morgan Kaufmann 1991
• with George Ferguson: TRIPS: An Integrated Intelligent Problem-Solving Assistant, Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on AI (AAAI-98), Madison, Wisconsin, 1998
• with N. Chambers u. a .: PLOW: a collaborative task learning agent, AAAI 2007

Web links

• Homepage