James Allan

Associate Professor, Computer Science
Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval
Information retrieval; event-based information organization; minimally interactive retrieval and organization

Background: Ph.D., Computer Science, Cornell University (1995), M.S., Computer Science, Cornell University (1991), A.B., Mathematics, Grinnell College (1983). Professor Allan joined the Computer Science Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1994 as a Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate and became a Research Assistant Professor in 1996. In 1998, he became an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Assistant Director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR). Currently, he is an Associate Professor and co-Director of the CIIR. He previously spent five years as a systems programmer/analyst at Dickinson College and has been a partner in a software services company.

Research: Professor Allan's research focuses on the automatic organization of textual information. He is interested in statistical methods extracting "concepts" from text and finding relationships between those concepts that can be used to impose structure that is otherwise hidden. For example, in the Topic Detection and Tracking work, the effort is toward adding topic-based structure to broadcast news sources as it evolves over time. He is also interested in information visualization, or methods for showing people the relationships between text or concepts--often when those relationships are not easily described by rules.

Activities and awards: Professor Allan leads the Research Experience for Undergraduates program at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval. That project supports 10 undergraduates in research-related projects primarily during the summer, but also throughout the schoolyear. Professor Allan has served recently on program committees for the Broadcast News Transcription and Understanding workshop, SIGIR, CIKM, and ACL. He is the project leader for an NSF-sponsored summer workshop on Novelty-based Topic Detection, to be held at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Allan was been selected as a University of Massachusetts Amherst Lilly Teaching Fellow for the Academic Year 1999-2000.

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