Rob Kling

Rob Kling (August 1944 – May 15, 2003) was an American professor of information systems and information science at the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) and adjunct professor of computer science at Indiana University Bloomington in the United States. He directed the interdisciplinary Center for Social Informatics (CSI), at Indiana University. Previously, he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1971 to 1973, and then at the University of California, Irvine for 23 years before starting at Indiana University in 1996.

He is considered to have been a key founder of social analyses of computing and a leading expert on the study of social informatics; he was described by the Los Angeles Times as "the founding father of social informatics".

Kling was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, U.S. He earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia University before obtaining a master's degree and doctoral degree in artificial intelligence from Stanford University; he worked as a research engineer for the Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center. He died on May 15, 2003 in Bloomington, Indiana of cardiovascular disease at age 58.