James F. Allen Retirement Celebration: A Mini-Symposium:
JamesFest: A Day of Talks by Paul Cohen, Phil Cohen, Henry Kautz, and Diane Litman
Friday, December 10, 2021, 9AM—5PM
Full details are at https://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/schubert/jamesfest/
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, and we very much hope you will register (see below) and attend them.
Program
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)
Registration
Registration for the talks and attendance is free.
But if you will be attending (please do!), please do register by Wednesday December 1st, and indicate whether you will be attending in-person or via Zoom. (This will let us know how many will attend and will help us get the supply of refreshments right-sized for the talks.) To register, please simply click on this registration link and on the form let us know that you will be attending in-person or attending remotely, and include your name, affiliation (if any, e.g., UR-CS UG student, or RIT CS faculty, or Google Mountain View), and email. (Notes: (a) As a general matter and as a courtesy to the planning, please, please do register by December 1. However... if you did not register, but as Dec. 10 arrives you wish to attend these talks, of course do register late and join the sessions.. (b) The jamesfest "at" lists "dot" rochester.edu email address goes to the JamesFest organizers.
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 north of College Town on Mt. Hope Ave., about a 15-25 min walk from Wegmans Hall, along Elmwood Ave past the Strong Memorial Hospital. This includes Moe's Southwest Grill (Mexican food) and Tai Chi Bubble Tea (ramen, rice dishes, etc.), 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 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 the UR faculty/staff and a small group of others such as the invited speakers will be going to that after the mini-symposium.)