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John is a native of Batesville, Arkansas where he graduated from high school in 1963. He earned a BS in Mathematics from Arkansas State University in 1967. During his junior year he participated in the first programming course offered at ASU. It was a FORTRAN course done entirely on paper using IBM workbooks because there were no computers on the campus at that time. After he graduated from ASU, he went on to complete a MS and PhD in Mathematics at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Upon graduation, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. In 1977 he left academia and returned to his home town of Batesville, where he purchased a used IBM System/3 Model 20 computer and started Data Management Services. After a year of successful operation, the company and its clients were acquired by a local accounting firm, Carter, Mitchum, and Company, CPAs and John was hired as the Information Systems Manager.
In 1983 John took a position as Associate Professor in the newly formed Computer Science Department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. In 1986 he was appointed as department chair and served in that position until 1993.
In 1995, John left UALR to take a position at Acxiom Corporation in the technology division led by Alex Dietz.
John is now a Professor of Information Science and the Acxiom Chair of Information Quality at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock where he continues to serve as the Coordinator for the Information Quality Graduate Program.
He has a home in Little Rock and has 4 children and 7 grandchildren and all but one are residing in Arkansas.