Tim Bell (computer scientist)

Tim Bell CNZM
Bell in 2024
Born	Timothy Clinton Bell
Education	Nelson College
Alma mater	University of Canterbury
Awards	Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education (2018)
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science education, computer music and text compression
Thesis	A unifying theory and improvements for existing approaches to text compression (1986)
Doctoral advisor	John Penny
Website	www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/tim.bell

Timothy Clinton Bell CNZM is a New Zealand computer scientist, with interests in computer science education, computer music and text compression. In 2017, it was announced by SIGCSE that Bell would receive the 2018 award for 'Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education'.[1][2]

Education

Bell was educated at Nelson College from 1975 to 1979.[3] He completed his PhD at the University of Canterbury, with a thesis titled A unifying theory and improvements for existing approaches to text compression.[4]

Career and research

Bell joined the staff and rose to professor and 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.[5] The system was actively promoted by Google in 2007.[6]

In the 2024 New Year Honours, Bell was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to computer science education.[7]

Selected works

• Witten, Ian H., Alistair Moffat, Timothy C. Bell, Managing gigabytes: compressing and indexing documents and images. Morgan Kaufmann, 1999.
• Bell, Timothy C., John G. Cleary, and Ian H. Witten. Text compression. Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1990.
• Witten, Ian H., and Timothy C. Bell. "The zero-frequency problem: Estimating the probabilities of novel events in adaptive text compression." IEEE transactions on information theory 37, no. 4 (1991): 1085–1094.
• Ian H. Witten, Alistair Moffat, and Timothy C. Bell. Managing gigabytes: compressing and indexing documents and images. Morgan Kaufmann, 1999.
• Bell, Timothy, Ian H. Witten, and John G. Cleary. "Modeling for text compression." ACM Computing Surveys 21, no. 4 (1989): 557–591.

References

1. "SIGCSE 2018 Award Winners". Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. Retrieved 10 November 2017.
2. "UC academic Tim Bell to receive international award for Computer Science Education". University of Canterbury (News). Retrieved 10 November 2017.
3. Nelson College Old Boys' Register, 1856–2006, 6th edition (CD-ROM).
4. Bell, Timothy (1986). A unifying theory and improvements for existing approaches to text compression (Doctoral thesis). UC Research Repository, University of Canterbury. doi:10.26021/2003. hdl:10092/8411.
5. "Tim Bell | Computer Science Unplugged". Archived from the original on 15 October 2009. Retrieved 25 June 2014.
6. "Google for Educators". www.google.com. Archived from the original on 23 August 2007. Retrieved 13 January 2022.
7. "New Year Honours 2024: the full list". The New Zealand Herald. 30 December 2023. Retrieved 30 December 2023.