James F. Allen Retirement Celebration:
JamesFest: A Day of Talks by Paul Cohen, Phil Cohen, Henry Kautz, and Diane Litman

Friday, December 10, 2021, 9AM—5PM

Note: Videos of three of the talks are now available:
Henry Kautz's talk (with Len Schubert's preamble about James Allen)
Diane Litman's talk
Paul Cohen's talk

Warmest thanks to everyone who attended JamesFest and made it such a memorable day!




Introduction

James F. Allen has retired as of July 1 of this year, after more than 43 years at the University of Rochester's Department of Computer Science. To celebrate James' career, the department is hosting a set of accessible, enjoyable talks on Artificial intelligence, highlighting the higher-level aspects of machine cognition, in keeping with the tenor of James' many years of groundbreaking research on collaborative agents that reason and plan while interacting through language.

The talks are all open to the public, with free registration up to a capacity limit, either in-person or via Zoom.




Quick Links

Home
Introduction
Program
Registration
Lunch Break
The Department's Retirement-Announcement Text
Room Location(s)
Getting to Rochester
Directions to River Campus and Information on Parking
Lodging
Things To Do in Rochester
Organizers
      
picture of James F. Allen
James F. Allen



Program

Our four distinguished speakers are the following (with links to their home pages; see also Bios in the talk abstracts):

The schedule for the day is as follows:
9:00 -10:00 Henry Kautz; talk title: Creative Language for Humorous and Political Purposes (abstract)
10:00 -10:30 Break.
10:30 -11:30 Diane Litman; talk title: Towards Conversational Agents as Collaboration Facilitators in Multiparty Human Dialogue. (abstract)
11:30 -2:30 Free Time for Lunch (see the Lunch Break section on this page).
2:30 -3:30 Paul Cohen; talk title: Knowing the World, Neglected Literature and the Foresight of James Allen. (abstract)
3:30 -4:00 Break.
4:00 -5:00 Phil Cohen; talk title: Back to the Future for Dialogue Systems (abstract)



Registration

The registration for attending the JamesFest talks is now closed, but UR locals are still welcome at the talks. Thanks to everyone who replied and registered, and see you at JamesFest!


Lunch Break

The lunch period is left free for people to find food in groups of their own, with old or newly made friends.

As to where to do that, there are some lunch-time food options available in College Town and on Mt. Hope Ave., near College Town, about a 20-25 min walk from Wegmans Hall, along Elmwood Ave past the Strong Memorial Hospital. This includes (south of Elmwood on Mt. Hope) India House Express (1340 Mt. Hope), Chipotle Mexican Grill (1360 Mt. Hope), Bunga Burger Bar (1370 Mt. Hope), Pita Restaurant (1378 Mt. Hope -- Lebanese), Tai Chi Bubble Tea (1367 Mt. Hope -- ramen, rice dishes, etc.), Moe's Southwest Grill (1377 Mt. Hope -- Mexican food), Crave (1386 Mt. Hope -- fast food), and Mamasan's Noodle Caboodle Restaurant (!400 Mt. Hope -- Thai cuisine); and (north of Elmwood) Elmwood Inn (1256 Mt Hope Ave), and for more intrepid walkers, The Distillery (1142 Mt Hope); well, and a Starbucks inside the Barnes & Noble bookstore (and another at 1397 Mt. Hope), and a Tim Horton and Cam's Pizzeria at the corner of Mt. Hope and Elmwood.

Unfortunately the most popular restaurants in College Town, the Grappa and Texas de Brazil, are open only from 5pm onward on Fridays, perhaps as a consequence of cutbacks during the COVID-19 pandemic. To see a complete directory of College Town restaurants and other amenities, check out this page. Skip past the ads and click "Download directory" to see the map and indexed listing. On the map, the prominent diagonal street is Mt. Hope Avenue. This forms a corner at the bottom of the image with Elmwood Avenue; you can see the River Campus, Elmwood Ave, and the College Town area in this Google map. The historic Mt. Hope Cemetery (where Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass are buried) forms a wedge between the River campus and Elmwood. There is free parking adjacent to the Hilton Garden Inn in College Town, and in another big lot on the south side of Celebration Drive in College Town.

Several on-campus eateries are closed (including the Faculty Club) because of COVID-19, though you can see some possibilities here, in particular the Douglass Dining center (in the Frederick Douglass building) and The Pit (in Wilson Commons), both about 4 minutes from Wegmans Hall.

(For completeness and to avoid confusion, we should mention that on this same day there is a separate event—an invitation-only departmental retirement dinner for James. So a group including James and the invited speakers will be going to that after the mini-symposium.)


The Department's Retirement-Announcement Text

James F. Allen, an internationally renowned AI researcher, retired from the University of Rochester this past July. The department will miss him greatly, though we are very happy that in retirement he plans to continue his engagement with the department. On December 10, the department will be hosting a day of talks in honor of James.

James joined the Computer Science Department at Rochester as its fifth faculty member in 1978, after receiving his PhD from the University of Toronto. His early work focused on the development of a plan-based theory of speech acts, which launched him to immediate prominence, and still serves as one of the most influential computational models of dialogue behavior developed to date.

To further the development of this model, he focused on formal underpinnings and wrote two landmark papers, each with more than 15,000 citations, on action and time: “Maintaining Knowledge About Temporal Intervals” and “Towards a General Theory of Action and Time” published in the Communications of the ACM in 1983 and in the journal Artificial Intelligence in 1984, respectively. In 1984, he was one of the first recipients of the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.

His research has always focused on exploring the connection between language understanding and knowledge-based reasoning, especially in natural language conversational systems. Some of his most prominent achievements from the late 1980s forward were his widely used text, Natural Language Understanding (Benjamin/Cummins 1987, with a second edition in 1995), covering the full processing spectrum from linguistic structure analysis to meaning representation, discourse, and interactive problem-solving agents; his voice-based mixed-initiative planning assistants TRAINS-95 and TRIPS (ca. 1998) developed with George Ferguson and others; influential analyses of planning as reasoning (leading to a 1991 treatise with several PhD advisees on Reasoning about Plans), and of discourse cues and obligations; a series of pilot projects from 2005-2014 implementing personal medication and health management advisors; the 2006 PLOW system for one-shot learning of procedures for web-based interaction (which played a significant role in the genesis of the first commercial personal assistant, SIRI); and in recent years, practical and theoretical developments together with his students and IHMC collaborators aimed at realistic collaborative problem solving and learning by computers, and deepened language comprehension with themes such as quantifier scoping, the interpretation, interrelation, and entailments of verbs, adjectives and comparatives, and the creation of a now well-known story corpus designed to foster competition and progress in machine learning and understanding.

In 1983, James became the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Computational Linguistics (now called Computational Linguistics). The journal flourished and grew to be the leading publication venue in the area by the time his term ended in 1993. He became chair of the department in 1987, the same year he was promoted to full professor.

In 1992, he was named the John H. Dessauer Professor of Computer Science, acquiring the endowed chair originally held by Jerry Feldman, the founder of the department. James was director of the Cognitive Science Program from 1992 to 1996 and the co-director of the new Center for the Sciences of Language from 1996 to 1998. From 1999 to 2002, he served on the National Science Foundation’s Advisory committees for both the Computer and Information Science Directorate and the Environmental Research and Education Directorate.

In 1997, James won the University’s Curtis Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. Over the course of his career, he supervised 34 PhDs, spanning from his first student who graduated in 1981 to his final two students in 2020. Two of James’s former advisees, Henry Kautz and George Ferguson, are currently faculty at Rochester. Allen was elected a Charter Fellow of the AAAI in 1990, a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2019, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2020. He received the Herbert A Simon Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cognitive Systems in 2020. James' presence in our department has profoundly impacted the direction and success of our educational mission, and his research initiatives and leadership have made very important and highly visible contributions that will stand the test of time and continue to influence the quest for machines that truly understand us and collaborate with us.


Room Location(s)

The room for the four talks of JamesFest will be Wegmans Hall, Room 1400. That room is the large auditorium partially on and partially below the ground floor of Wegmans Hall, which has been the new home of the CS department since 2017.

This is the the UR River Campus Map. You can see Wegmans Hall's location on it; it is near the lower part of the core campus, just north of the Hajim Science & Engineering Quadrangle.


Getting to Rochester

The university and the (see the Lodging section below) suggested hotel are each about a 10-minute drive from the airport (whose airport code is ROC).

Rochester also has train service (Amtrak) and bus service (Greyhound), which each drop you near downtown, about a 15-minute taxi ride to the university and the suggested hotel.


Directions to River Campus and Information on Parking

Information on visitor parking at River Campus of University of Rochester

What you should do is drive up to the visitor's information booth. The Visitor Info booth is just north of Elmwood Avenue and Trustee Rd., on Wilson Blvd.; it is marked on the River Campus map (see the earlier link).

If the booth is staffed (from 7:30am to 7:00pm weekdays), buy a one-day guest permit for $6 and obtain a campus map, and park in whatever lot the agent directs you to park in. (Allow for several minutes' walk from whatever lot you're directed to to Wegmans Hall.) After hours and on weekends there is no charge.

If the booth is not staffed , then the right thing to do is to drive about ten feet past the booth, U-turn, then turn left on Trustee Road, and then turn right on Intercampus Drive and then park in any space not specially marked as Handicapped/Reserved/Etc. in the Zone 2 South lots ("Bridge Lot" and the north end of Park Lot) or the Zone 3 South Lot (all of Park Lot except its north end).


Lodging

For out-of-town visitors who will be staying overnight, we recommend the new Hilton Garden Inn, located at 30 Celebration Drive, Rochester, NY, 14620, in the new College Town area; its phone number is +1-585-424-4404. It is a 15-25-minute walk to the department in Wegmans Hall) from the hotel.

Jenna Price, the CS department's administrative staff member who most often interacts with that hotel, says that you should be able to get the (UR) corporate rate by letting them know you are coming to attend a University of Rochester event. She says that if they need to verify that you are, you should please ask them to contact her, at +1 585 275-5671 or at her email address of jenna "dot" price "at" rochester.edu.

Note, though, that: (a) If you are eligible for a AAA or AARP or other discounted rate, please do also ask the hotel about its rate under that discount, as it could be better than the corporate rate; and (b) the corporate rate fluctuates sharply based on availability, and so booking earlier is probably better than booking later.

The only other hotel within walking distance of the department is Staybridge Suites Rochester University (phone: +1-585-527-9110; but walking in a group, or driving, is recommended for safety).


Things To Do in Rochester

In case you arrive early or leave late, here are some pointers to fun things to do in Rochester:

As our own advice, the George Eastman House/Museum is probably the top attraction of Rochester. But there are many other great things to see: the Strong National Museum of Play (esp. for kids), the Seneca Park Zoo (esp. for kids), the Memorial Art Gallery (a very nice fine art museum), the Rochester Public Market (a large street market), the Lake Ontario shore (e.g., walking in Durand Eastman Park), and much more. The TripAdvisor.com link in the list above provides links to each of these along with reviews and information.