Melvin Earl (Bill) Maron

Melvin Earl (Bill) Maron (1924-2016) was a US professor of information science.

Life

Melvin Earl ("Bill") Maron was born on January 23, 1924 in Bloomfield, New Jersey. After enrolling in the Newark College of Engineering in 1942, he enlisted in the Army Corp of Engineers. The following June he was sent to basic training at Ft. Riley, Kansas, and thereafter sent to the Engineering College at the University of Nebraska as part of what was called the Army Specialized Training Corps. He served in the Army in Europe until 1946, then returned to the University of Nebraska, where in addition to his BS in Mechanical Engineering, he completed a BA in Physics in 1947. He then transferred to UCLA and completed a PhD in Philosophy in 1951 with a thesis on "The meaning of the probability concept."

After teaching logic at UCLA then working for IBM in San Jose, CA, and Endicott, NY, he returned at the end of 1955 to Los Angeles and worked for Ramo-Wooldridge on computer handling of data. In 1959 he moved to the RAND Corporation and in 1966 to the School of Librarianship, University of California, Berkeley, where he was also, initially, Director of the Institute for Library Research. He retired in 1991 and died on September 28, 2016.

Contributions

Maron was involved in the early developments in data base design and also probabilistic indexing. Maron and David Blair performed a landmark evaluation of information retrieval performance.

Publications

Maron's published papers were mainly on probabilistic techniques in information retrieval. A few are listed by Google scholar. [1]

• "On relevance, probabilistic indexing and information retrieval." With J. L. Kuhns. Journal of the ACM 7, no. 3 (1960): 216-244. [2]
• "Automatic indexing: an experimental inquiry." Journal of the ACM 8, no. 3 (1961): 404-417. [3] Reprinted in Key papers in information science, ed. by A. Elias. [Washington, DC]: American Society for Information Science, [1971]'
• "On indexing, retrieval and the meaning of about." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 28, no. 1 (1977): 38-43.
• "The unified probabilistic model for IR*." With S. E. Robertson & W. S. Cooper. In: Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM conference on Research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR ’82). New York: Springer-Verlag, 1982, pp 108-117. [4]
• "An evaluation of retrieval effectiveness for a full-text document-retrieval system." With D. C. Blair. Communications of the ACM 28, no. 3 (1985): 289-299. [5]

• "An historical note on the origins of probabilistic indexing." Information processing & management 44, no. 2 (2008): 971-972.

Further reading

• In Memory of Professor Emeritus Melvin “Bill” Maron. UC Berkeley School of Information. [6]