Bob Allen

Introduction

Professor Robert B. (Bob) Allen is a Visiting Professorial Fellow at SIM in 2012, bringing a broad teaching repertoire including Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Information Retrieval, Digital Preservation, and Language Processes. He has taught in the iSchools at Drexel and the University of Maryland, and before that was a senior scientist in the Information Science Research Group at Bellcore and in Research at Bell Laboratories.

Bob's recent research has emphasised specification and interaction with narrative chains such as those from stories, from scientific explanations, and from narrative history. He has also published a comprehensive informatics textbook online: Information: A Fundamental Construct.

Bob received his PhD in Social and Cognitive Experimental Psychology from UCSD, and was an early pioneer in the development of recommender systems and made substantial contributions to hardware implementation of neural networks. He has been Program Chair or General Chair of several major conferences, was Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems for 10 years, and Chair of the Publications Board of the ACM.

 >> Visit Bob's home page

Qualifications

BA, Reed College, Oregon; MA, PhD, University of California, San Diego

Teaching

Bob will be co-teaching on INFO 527 Representing and Organising Information in Context (T1) and INFO 528 Research Methods for Information Management Environments (T2). In Trimester 2 he will also be coordinating a Special Topic course.

Selected Publications

Allen, R. B. (2011). Weaving content with coordination widgets. D-Lib Magazine (forthcoming). DLIB

Allen, R. B. (2011). Coordinating concepts and discourse in model-oriented research reports. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 7008, 392-394. PDF

Allen, R. B. (2011). Developing a knowledge-base to improve interaction with collections of historical newspapers. IFLA Congress, August 2011, San Juan, PR.  PDF

Allen, R. B. (2011). Information resource coordination as annotation. STLR Workshop, June 2011, Ottawa.

Allen, R. B. (2011). Model-oriented scientific research reports. D-Lib, May 2011. DLIB

Zhu, W. Z. & Allen, R. B. (2011). Document clustering using the LSI subspace signature model. JASIST (in press).

Allen, R. B. (2011). Visualization, causation, and history. iConference, 2011. ACM

Zarro, M. & Allen, R. B. (2010). User-contributed descriptive metadata for libraries and cultural institutions. European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL), 46-54. LNCS

Allen, R. B. & Hall, C. (2010). Automated processing of digitized historical newspapers beyond the article level: Finding sections and regular features. International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL), 91-101. LNCS

Waters, J. & Allen, R. B. (2010). Music metadata in a new key: Metadata and annotation for music in a digital world. Journal of Library Metadata, 10(4), 238-256.

 >> See more of Bob's publications and research highlights