Joseph J. Allaire

Joseph J. Allaire (born 1969), better known professionally as J. J. Allaire, is an American-born software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He created the ColdFusion programming language and web application server, founded Allaire Corporation, OnFolio, FitNow, and RStudio, and created Lose It! and Windows Live Writer. Allaire is currently the founder and CEO of statistical computing company Posit (formerly RStudio Inc).

Early life Joseph J Allaire received his bachelor's degree from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1991. The same year, Allaire founded Allaire Corporation in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Allaire served as the Chairman and CEO of Allaire Corporation, then as its Executive Vice President of Products after hiring David Orfao as the company's CEO. In 2001, Allaire Corporation was acquired by Macromedia.

Onfolio, Microsoft, and Windows Live Writer In 2002, Allaire co-founded Onfolio with Adam Berrey and led the development of its suite of tools for web research and publishing, released in 2004. Onfolio was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. At Microsoft, Allaire created a blog publishing product called Windows Live Writer, initially released in 2007. Windows Live Writer was distributed by Microsoft as part of Windows Essentials, until it was discontinued in 2015 and forked into an open-source version called Open Live Writer.

FitNow and Lose It! In 2008, Allaire, Paul DiCristina and Charles Teague co-founded FitNow, a company dedicated to mobile health and fitness applications, and created Lose It!, a mobile weight loss application with over 17 million users.

RStudio In 2009, Allaire founded RStudio, a company that builds tools for the R statistical computing environment. Allaire created the company's flagship product RStudio, a 2015 InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award recipient.

Beginning in 2013, Allaire worked on the R Markdown ecosystem of scientific publishing packages, including R Markdown, Distill for R, and Flexdashboard. From 2018 through 2020, Allaire worked on R interfaces to Python, and R versions of the TensorFlow and Keras Python packages.

In 2021, Allaire and Charles Teague created Quarto, a Jupyter-based scientific publishing system. Quarto was publicly announced in 2022.

Inspect AI In 2024, Allaire joined the UK AI Security Institute as a staff engineer, where he led the development of Inspect AI, an open-source framework for evaluating large language models. Inspect was first open-sourced in May 2024, and has since been adopted by research organisations including METR, Apollo Research, and SecureBio, model developers including Anthropic, Thinking Machines, and Hugging Face, and governments including the UK AI Security Institute and the US NIST Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI).