Trisha Shetty (Editor)

Allen Kent

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Occupation
  
information scientist

Died
  
1 May 2014

Years active
  
1952–1992

Born
  
October 24, 1921 (
1921-10-24
)
New York City

People also search for
  
Harold Lancour, Thomas J. Galvin

Books
  
The Shield of Darius, The Weavers of Meanche, River of Light and Shadow, Wild Whistling Blackbird, Guardians of the Second S

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

Contents

Early life

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

Career

In 1955, he helped found the Center for Documentation Communication Research at Western Reserve University. This was "the first academic program in the field of mechanized information retrieval, first using cards, then utilizing new reel-to-reel tape technology." 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. He retired from the university in 1992. At the time of his death, he was Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh The school named a scholarship after him.

Awards

  • 1968 Eastman Kodak Award for significant contributions to the Science of Information Technology
  • 1977 Award of Merit from ASIS
  • 1980 Best Information Science Book from ASIS
  • References

    Allen Kent Wikipedia