Joseph J. Allaire

Joseph J. Allaire, born in 1969 and known professionally as J. J. Allaire, is an American-born software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He received a bachelor's degree from Macalester College in 1991. In 1995 he created ColdFusion, a programming language and web application server, and founded Allaire Corporation, which went public in 1999 and was acquired by Macromedia in 2001. He later co-founded Onfolio, bought by Microsoft in 2006, where he created the blog publishing product Windows Live Writer. In 2008 he co-founded FitNow and created the mobile weight loss application Lose It. In 2009 he founded RStudio, building tools for the R statistical computing environment, and later worked on the R Markdown publishing packages, R interfaces to TensorFlow and Keras, and the Quarto scientific publishing system created with Charles Teague. He leads Posit, formerly RStudio, and in 2024 joined the UK AI Security Institute, where he led development of the open-source Inspect AI framework for evaluating large language models.