Friday, December 10, 2021, 9AM—5PM
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
Links to the abstracts will appear in the following schedule as soon as those are finalized. Our four distinguished speakers are the following:
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.
Further information can be found at the website.