Jim Bezdek received the PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 1973. Jim is past president of NAFIPS (North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society), IFSA (International Fuzzy Systems Association) and the IEEE CIS (Computational Intelligence Society); founding editor the Int'l. Jo. Approximate Reasoning and the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems; Life fellow of the IEEE and IFSA; and a recipient of the IEEE 3rd Millennium, IEEE CIS Fuzzy Systems Pioneer, and IEEE technical field award Rosenblatt medals.

Jim's interests: woodworking, optimization, motorcycles, pattern recognition, cigars, clustering in very large data, fishing, co-clustering, blues music, wireless sensor networks, poker and visual clustering. And of course, clustering in big data. Jim retired in 2007, and will be coming to a university near you soon.