Friday, December 10, 2021, 9AM—5PM
Our four distinguished speakers are the following (with links
to their home pages; see also Bios in the talk abstracts):
- Paul Cohen,
Professor and Director of MOMACS (Modeling and Managing Complicated Systems),
University of Pittsburgh
- Phil Cohen,
Chief Scientist at Openstream, Inc., and remaining as Adjunct Professor
of Data Science and AI, Monash University
- Henry Kautz, Division Director for Informations & Intelligent Systems at NSF,
and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester and
founding director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science at UR
- Diane Litman, Professor of Computer Science, a Senior Scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), and Faculty of the Intelligent Systems Program (ISP), all at the University of Pittsburgh.
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)
|
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
