Timothy Clinton Bell is a New Zealand computer scientist, with interests in computer science education, computer music and text compression. In 2017, it was announced by

SIGCSE SIGCSE is the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Computer Science Education (CSE), which provides a forum for educators to discuss issues related to the development, implementation, and/or evaluation of c ...

that Bell would receive the 2018 award for 'Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education'.

Education

Bell was educated at

Nelson College Nelson College is the oldest state secondary school in New Zealand, a feat achieved in part thanks to its original inception as a private school. It is an all-boys school in the City of Nelson that teaches from years 9 to 13. In addition, it r ...

from 1975 to 1979, and was

dux ''Dux'' (, : ''ducēs'') is Latin for "leader" (from the noun ''dux, ducis'', "leader, general") and later for duke and its variant forms (doge, duce, etc.). During the Roman Republic and for the first centuries of the Roman Empire, ''dux'' coul ...

in his final year.''Nelson College Old Boys' Register, 1856–2006'', 6th edition (CD-ROM). He completed his PhD at the

University of Canterbury The University of Canterbury (UC; ; postnominal abbreviation ''Cantuar.'' or ''Cant.'' for ''Cantuariensis'', the Latin name for Canterbury) is a public research university based in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was founded in 1873 as Canterbur ...

, with a thesis titled ''A unifying theory and improvements for existing approaches to text compression.''

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. The system was actively promoted by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

in 2007. In the

2024 New Year Honours The 2024 New Year Honours are appointments by some of the 15 Commonwealth realms to Orders and decorations of the Commonwealth realms, various orders and honours to recognise and reward good works by citizens of those countries. The New Year Hono ...

, Bell was appointed a

Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit The New Zealand Order of Merit () is an order of merit in the New Zealand royal honours system. It was established by royal warrant on 30 May 1996 by Elizabeth II, Queen of New Zealand, "for those persons who in any field of endeavour, have ...

, for services to computer science education.

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

Living people New Zealand computer scientists University of Canterbury alumni Academic staff of the University of Canterbury People educated at Nelson College Year of birth missing (living people) Companions of the New Zealand Order of Merit {{NewZealand-academic-bio-stub