CICS Chair of Faculty James Allan Elected Treasurer of CRA Executive Committee

College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Professor and Chair of the Faculty James Allan has been elected treasurer of the Computing Research Association (CRA) Executive Committee. Allan was elected to the post by the CRA Board of Directors during the board's February meeting and will serve a two-year term starting on July 1.

In addition to his role as chair of the CICS faculty, Allan is co-director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, where he is continuing his nearly 30-year research program in Information Retrieval (IR), the science behind search engines and similar technology. His work focuses on how IR can support critical literacy by, among other ways, helping people identify the agenda of a text's author and a text's broader context. He received an M.S. degree and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Cornell University in 1991 and 1995, respectively, and an A.B. in mathematics from Grinnell College in 1983.

Founded in 1972, CRA's membership includes more than 200 North American organizations active in computing research, including academic departments of computer science, information, and computer engineering, laboratories and centers (industry, government, and academia), and affiliated professional societies.