Preface

This book is dedicated to Stan Matwin in recognition of the numerous contributions he has made to the fields of machine learning, data mining, and big data analysis to date. With the opening of the Institute for Big Data Analytics at Dalhousie University, of which he is the founder and the current Director, we expect many more important contributions in the future. Stan Matwin was born in Poland. He received his Master’s degree in 1972 and his Ph.D. in 1977, both from the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics at Warsaw University, Poland. From 1975 to 1979, he worked in the Institute of Computer Science at that Faculty as an Assistant Professor. Upon immigrating to Canada in 1979, he held a number of lecturing positions at Canadian universities, including the University of Guelph, York University, and Acadia University. In 1981, he joined the Department of Computer Science (now part of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) at the University of Ottawa, where he carved out a name for the department in the field of machine learning over his 30+ year career there (he became a Full Professor in 1992, and a Distinguished University Professor in 2011). He simultaneously received the State Professorship from the Republic of Poland in 2012. He founded the Text Analysis and Machine Learning (TAMALE) lab at the University of Ottawa, which he led until 2013. In 2004, he also started cooperating as a “foreign” professor with the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences (IPI PAN) in Warsaw. Furthermore, he was invited as a visiting researcher or professor in many other universities in Canada, USA, Europe, and Latin America, where in 1997 he received the UNESCO Distinguished Chair in Science and Sustainable Development (Universidad de Sao Paulo, ICMSC, Brazil). In addition to his position as professor and researcher, he served in a number of organizational capacities: former president of the Canadian Society for the Computational Studies of Intelligence (CSCSI), now the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Society (CAIAC), and of the IFIP Working Group 12.2 (Machine Learning), Founding Director of the Information Technology Cluster of the Ontario Research Centre for Electronic Commerce, Chair of the NSERC Grant Selection