Allen Kent

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Allen Kent
Born (1921-10-24)October 24, 1921
Harlem, New York City
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Scott, New York
Occupation information scientist
Years active 1952–1992

Allen Kent (October 24, 1921 – May 1, 2014) was an information scientist.

Early life

He was born in Harlem, New York City.[1] At City College of New York he earned a degree in chemistry.[2] During World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps.[2] After the war, he worked on a classified project at MIT in mechanized document encoding and search.[1]

Career

In 1955, he helped found the Center for Documentation Communication Research at Western Reserve University.[3] This was "the first academic program in the field of mechanized information retrieval, first using cards, then utilizing new reel-to-reel tape technology."[1] In the same year he introduce the measures of precision and recall in Perry, Kent & Berry (1955). He joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1963, where in 1970 he began the Department of Information Science.[4] He retired from the university in 1992.[4] At the time of his death, he was Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh[4] The school named a scholarship after him.[5]

Selective bibliography

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  • "A Machine That Does Research," (April 1959), Harper's Magazine
  • Information Analysis and Retrieval, 1962
  • The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science
  • The Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology
  • The Encyclopedia of Microcomputers

Awards

  • 1968 Eastman Kodak Award for significant contributions to the Science of Information Technology[citation needed]
  • 1977 Award of Merit from ASIS[6]
  • 1980 Best Information Science Book from ASIS[7]

References

Archival Materials