James F. Allen (computer scientist)

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, dialogue systems, planning/agent-based systems, and machine learning. This paper won the outstanding paper award at AAAI in 2007.

In 1992 he became the Dessaurer Professor at Rochester.

He is also the co-author with Henry Kautz, Richard Pelavin, and Josh Tenenberg of Reasoning About Plans (Morgan Kaufmann, 1991).

In 1991 he was elected as a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (1990, founding fellow).

Allen is the author of the textbook Natural Language Understanding (Benjamin-Cummings, 1987; 2nd ed., 1995).

Allen received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1979, under the supervision of C. Raymond Perrault, after which he joined the faculty at Rochester. 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. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of Computational Linguistics from 1983–1993. Since 2006 he has also been associate director of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

James Frederick Allen (born 1950) is a computational linguist recognized for his contributions to temporal logic, in particular Allen's interval algebra. He is interested in knowledge representation, 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". He is the John H. Dessaurer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester