Richard Wallace

Also known as Richard S. Wallace

Richard Wallace is a computer scientist who created the A.L.I.C.E. chatbot and developed AIML with a worldwide free-software community. Born in Portland, Maine, in 1960, he earned a computer science PhD at Carnegie Mellon in 1989 and worked in computer vision and robotics before turning to chatbots. A.L.I.C.E. won the Loebner Prize in 2000, 2001, and 2004 and the Chatterbox Challenge in 2004; a 2002 collaboration with Franz produced Pandorabots. He coauthored a 2024 neuro-symbolic paper on the UMLS Metathesaurus and is an AI scientist at Franz Inc., where he works on medical AI predictions with large language models and symbolic methods.

Now at: Franz Inc.
Born: 1960
Works: 37
Citations: 1,390
h-index: 17
Badges: Bridge
Boomerang

Years link to their sources. Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

1960–1989

Robotics PhD at Carnegie Mellon

Born in Portland, Maine, in 1960, he joins Hans Moravec's graduate group at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute in 1983. At CMU, he works on autonomous vehicles, including a team effort on one of the first successful instances of robotic road-following. He completes a computer science PhD in September 1989 with the thesis ‘Finding Natural Clusters through Entropy Minimization.’
1990s

Vision Applications startup

In 1991, he works at Vision Applications, a New York City startup funded by a Department of Defense contract to produce a miniature active vision system; his specialty is computer vision and robotics. During the first half of the 1990s, he works to establish himself as a robotics and computer-vision professor at NYU and Lehigh.
1990–2002

A.L.I.C.E. and AIML

One thread that draws him to chatbots is a 1990 New York Times article about the first Loebner Prize contest. A.L.I.C.E. is activated in November 1995 as the first AIML-based personality program; the project receives contributions from over 500 developers around the world. Between 1995 and 2002, he develops AIML, an open-source XML framework, with a worldwide free-software community.
2000–2004

Three Loebner Prize wins

A.L.I.C.E. wins the Loebner Prize in 2000, 2001, and 2004, with Wallace listed as the winner in each competition.
2002

Pandorabots with Franz

In 2002, he begins a collaboration with Franz Inc. that produces Pandorabots, an AIML server and interpreter implemented in Common Lisp. He then becomes Chief Science Officer of Pandorabots, Inc.
2004

Chatterbox Challenge champion

A.L.I.C.E. wins the Chatterbox Challenge in 2004.
2024

Pruning cycles in UMLS

In 2024, he coauthors ‘Pruning Cycles in UMLS Metathesaurus: A Neuro Symbolic AI Approach’ with Ravi Bajracharya, Jans Aasman, and Craig Norvell for NLP4KGC-2024, the third workshop on natural language processing for knowledge graph creation.
As of October 2026

AI scientist at Franz

As of October 2026, he is an AI scientist at Franz Inc. His work combines large language models with symbolic methods for medical AI predictions. Founded in 1985, Franz starts by selling Lisp compilers and moves into graph database technology.