ABSTRACT
James Allen is a researcher who is not content to make only one major contribution to artificial intelligence. James Allen is famous for his temporal reasoning model that allows computers to reason about notions such as “before,” “after,” “at the same time,” and “during.” He has also helped develop several natural language dialogue systems that combine knowledge representation techniques in symbolic artificial intelligence with statistical learning. In the 1990s, Leslie Kaelbling and Michael Littman took a model from another branch of computer science and adapted it to artificial intelligence: the partially observable Markov decision process. When combined with reinforcement learning methods, this tool allows machines to calculate optimal solutions for planning problems by considering eventual uncertainties in the information transmitted by the sensors. Allen Newell is an artificial intelligence pioneer who was present at the Dartmouth workshop in 1956.
