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 and completed a BS in Mechanical Engineering.
In 1947 he transferred to UCLA and completed a PhD in Philosophy in 1951. After teaching logic at UCLA and working for IBM, 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 C. Blair performed a landmark evaluation of information retrieval performance.
Publications
Maron's published papers were mainly on probabilistic techniques in information retrieval. Several are listed by Google scholar. [1]
Further reading
- In Memory of Professor Emeritus Melvin “Bill” Maron. UC Berkeley School of Information. [2]