Dr. Zbigniew Ras is a professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He also holds professorship position in the Institute of Computer Science at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw, Poland. His PhD degree is from University of Warsaw and DSc Degree from the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2012, he was awarded National Professorship Title by the President of Poland. Dr. Ras' areas of specialization include Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Recommender Systems, Health Informatics, Business Analytics, Flexible Query Answering, Music Information Retrieval, and Art. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (Springer), Editor-in Chief of the International Journal of Social Network Mining (IJSNM), Senior Editor of International Journal of Data Mining, Modelling and Management (InderScience Publishers), and he served as the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Fundamenta Informaticae Journal (IOS Press), till 2010. He is the author of more than 250 publications and the editor of more than 40 books published by Springer and North Holland. He has received many awards including the Harshini V. de Silva Graduate Mentor Award, UNC-Charlotte, 2009; Finalist of the Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence, UNC-Charlotte, 2008; the COIT Graduate Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award, UNC-Charlotte, 2003; and the Alcoa Foundation Outstanding Faculty Award, UNC Charlotte, 1999-2000. He received competitive grants and contracts from NSF, DOD/ARO, ONR, ORNL, DOE, IBM, Committee for Scientific Research (Poland), and AMVIS (Czech Republic).