Tim Bell (computer scientist)

Bell was educated at Nelson College from 1975 to 1979, and was dux in his final year.^[1][2] He completed his PhD at the University of Canterbury, with a thesis titled A unifying theory and improvements for existing approaches to text compression.^[3]

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.^[4] The system was actively promoted by Google in 2007.^[5]

In 2017, it was announced by SIGCSE that Bell would receive the 2018 Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education.^[6][7] In 2018, he was also elected an ACM Distinguished Member.^[8]

In the 2024 New Year Honours, Bell was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to computer science education.^[9]

• 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.