Robert (Bob) B. Allen is an Associate Professor at the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University where he teaches courses and does research on information retrieval, question answering, digital libraries, multimedia, and information management. He was the first to develop and publish the basic algorithms used by recommender systems. He is currently working on visualization tools for interacting with events and narratives and he is the PI for grant to develop a model curriculum for the management of digital information.

Bob has been Chair of the Publications Board of the ACM and was Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems. Before moving to Drexel, he was a Professor of Practice at the College of Information Studies of the University of Maryland and before that he was Senior Scientist in the Information Science Research Group at Bellcore. He received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from UCSD and joined Bell Laboratories in 1978.

Updated: January 2007