William I. Grosky (or Bill for friends) passed away recently.

He received his B. Sc.

in Mathematics from MIT in 1965, his M. Sc.

in Applied Mathematics from Brown University in 1968, and his Ph. D.

from Yale University in 1971. William was a Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn (UMD).

Before joining UMD in 2001, he was a Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Wayne State University and an Assistant Professor of Information and Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. His research interests included multimedia information systems, text and image mining, and the semantic web.

He was a founding member of Intelligent Media LLC, a Michigan-based company that integrates new media into information technologies. William served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Multimedia magazine, as well as a Member of the Editorial Boards of many journals; in addition, he served as a Member of several Program Committees of conferences focusing on database and multimedia systems.

He published three books and over 150 papers in international conferences and journals. Our community remembers him as an excellent scientist and a very generous, funny, and curious person, passionately delivering lectures and seminars.

He was the person to speak to when one needed to brainstorm any new technologies or ideas. He used to state that one of the luxuries of academia is the ability to learn every day.

This volume is dedicated to his memory. .