Robert (Bob) B. Allen is a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the School of Information Management at the Victoria University of Wellington. In the past several years, his research has emphasized specification and interaction with narrative chains such as those from stories, from scientific explanations, and from narrative history. Earlier, Dr. Allen was a pioneer in the development or recommender systems and made substantial contributions to hardware implementation of neural networks. He has a broad teaching repertoire including Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Information Retrieval, Digital Preservation, and Language Processes. In addition, Dr. Allen has also released a comprehensive informatics textbook online which is titled “Information: A Fundamental Construct”. Bob has been Program Chair or General Chair of several major conferences. He was Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems for 10 years and Chair of the Publications Board of the ACM. He has taught in the iSchools at Drexel and the University of Maryland. Before that, he was Senior Scientist in the Information Science Research Group at Bellcore and in Research at Bell Laboratories. He received his PhD in Social and Cognitive Experimental Psychology from UCSD.

Updated: March 2012