Died 1 May 2014 | Years active 1952–1992 | |
Born October 24, 1921 ( 1921-10-24 ) New York City 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.
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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.