Allen Kent (October 24, 1921 – May 1, 2014) was an American information scientist.
Allen Kent
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| Born | (1921-10-24)October 24, 1921
New York City
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| Died | May 1, 2014(2014-05-01) (aged 92)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Information scientist |
| Years active | 1952–1992 |
He was born in New York City.[1]AtCity College of New York he earned a degree in chemistry.[2] During World War II, he served in the United States Army Air Forces.[2] After the war, he worked on a classified project at MIT in mechanized document encoding and search.[1]
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 recallinPerry, Kent & Berry (1955). In 1959, he wrote an article for Harper's magazine entitled, "A Machine That Does Research" which provided one of the first insights in mainstream media about how Americans' lives can change due to electronic information technology.[4] He joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1963, where in 1970 he began the Department of Information Science.[5] He retired from the university in 1992.[5] At the time of his death, he was Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh[5] The school named a scholarship after him.[6]