Tim Bell (computer scientist)

Tim Bell
Residence	New Zealand
Fields	computer science education, computer music and text compression
Education	Nelson College
Alma mater	University of Canterbury
Thesis	A unifying theory and improvements for existing approaches to text compression (1986)

Timothy Clinton Bell, nicknamed Dr Professor Mr Tim Bell, is a New Zealand computer scientist, with interests in computer science education, computer music and text compression.

Bell was educated at Nelson College from 1975 to 1979.^[1] After completing his PhD, with a thesis titled A unifying theory and improvements for existing approaches to text compression, at the University of Canterbury he joined the staff and rose to professor and head of department. He is currently deputy head of department.

In parallel with his academic work he has developed Computer Science Unplugged, a system of activities for teaching computer science without computers.^[2] The system was actively promoted by Google in 2007.^[3]

Selected works

• Text compression Timothy C Bell, John G Cleary and I H Witten. Prentice Hall, 1990. ISBN 0139119914
• Witten, Ian H.; Moffat, Alistair; Bell, Timothy Clinton (1999). Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and indexing documents and images (2 ed.). Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. ISBN 978-1-55860-570-1. 1558605703.
• A corpus for the evaluation of lossless compression algorithms Timothy C Bell. Data Compression Conference 1997
• The challenge of optical music recognition David Bainbridge and Timothy C Bell. Computers and the Humanities, 2001.

References

1. Nelson College Old Boys' Register, 1856–2006, 6th edition (CD-ROM).
2. http://csunplugged.org/users/tim-bell
3. https://web.archive.org/web/20070823152554/http://www.google.com/educators/activities.html

External links

• linked-in
• institutional homepage