Faculty Recruiting Support CICS

CICS Mourns the Passing of Staff Member Michael Zarozinski

Michael Zarozinski
Michael Zarozinski

Michael Zarozinski, a senior software engineer at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, passed away unexpectedly on December 9, 2019. Michael joined the CIIR in 2013, supporting a range of research projects for the center and working with many students over the years. He also briefly worked with the Center for Data Science, the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory at CICS, and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Zarozinski’s projects at the CIIR included managing the Proteus Project, a research infrastructure for scanned books used for humanities scholars working with Perseus Digital Library and the Internet Archive, and work on the Galago open-source search engine, supporting cross-language searching and providing critical enhancements to the Lemur Project.

As he described on his personal website, Zarozinski was a longtime software engineer who started programming as a child on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer with a 3MHz processor, 16K of RAM, and an audio cassette for storage. Outside of work, he volunteered as a mentor at Valley Venture Mentors, providing encouragement and guidance to new entrepreneurs in western Massachusetts. 

“Michael was a supportive and patient member of the staff, and a valued contributor to our research projects who brought intelligence and a sense of humor to his work,” said James Allan, professor and chair of the faculty at CICS, who also serves as co-director of CIIR. “He considered himself lucky to be able to make a living writing software, and frequently commented how much he enjoyed his work here. We are grateful to have worked with him. He will definitely be missed.”

A celebration of Michael’s life will be held in the spring of 2020, at a date to be announced.