Professor Richard S. Michalski passed away on September 20, 2007. Once we learned about his untimely death we immediately realized that we would no longer have with us a truly exceptional scholar and researcher who for several decades had been inf- encing the work of numerous scientists all over the world - not only in his area of exp- tise, notably machine learning, but also in the broadly understood areas of data analysis, data mining, knowledge discovery and many others. In fact, his influence was even much broader due to his creative vision, integrity, scientific excellence and excepti-...