Ian H. Witten

Ian Hugh Witten (born 4 March 1947 in Horsham, Sussex, England) was a computer scientist at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.[4][5][6] He was a Chartered Engineer with the Institute of Electrical Engineers.[7]

Ian Witten
Witten having received an Honorary Doctorate from the Open University in 2017[1]
Born
Ian Hugh Witten[2]

(1947-03-04)4 March 1947
Horsham, Sussex, England
Died(2023-05-05)5 May 2023
Matangi, New Zealand
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge (MA)
University of Calgary (MSc)
University of Essex (PhD)
Known forWEKA[3]
AwardsACM Fellow (1996)
Hector Medal (2005)
Scientific career
FieldsData mining
Machine learning
Digital libraries[4]
ThesisLearning to control (1976)
Notable studentsCraig Nevill-Manning[2]
Saul Greenberg[2]
Websitewww.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ihw

Education

Witten graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA and MA (First Class Honours) in mathematics in 1969 and an Master of Science degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Calgary, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar, in 1970.[8] He received his PhD in 1976 from the University of Essex.[9]

Career and research

Witten discovered temporal-difference learning, inventing the tabular TD(0),[10] the first temporal-difference learning rule for reinforcement learning. Witten was a co-creator of the Sequitur algorithm[11] and conceived and obtained funding for the development of the original WEKA software package for data mining.[3][12] Witten further made considerable contributions to the field of compression, creating novel algorithms for text and image compression with Alistair Moffat and Timothy C. Bell. He is also one of the major contributors to the digital libraries field, and founder of the Greenstone Digital Library Software.[13]

His former doctoral students include Craig Nevill-Manning and Saul Greenberg.[2]

Awards and honours

Witten was elected a ACM Fellow in 1996[14] and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ) in 1997.[15]

In 2004 he received the International Federation for Information Processing Namur Award for "contributions to the awareness of social implications of information technology, and the need for an holistic approach in the use of information technology that takes account of social implications"[16] and in 2005 the Hector Medal for contributions to many areas of computer science.[17]

Publications

His publications[4][5][6] included:

  • Data mining: practical machine learning tools and techniques with Java implementations[18]
  • Communicating with Microcomputers[19]
  • Principles of Computer Speech[20]
  • Making Computers Talk: an Introduction to Speech Synthesis[21]
  • Text Compression[22]
  • The Reactive Keyboard[23]
  • Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images[24]
  • Web Dragons: Inside the Myths of Search Engine Technology[25]
  • How to Build a Digital Library[26]
  • Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques[27]

References
  1. "Honorary graduate cumulative list". Retrieved 15 February 2021.
  2. Ian H. Witten at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. Mark Hall; Eibe Frank; Geoffrey Holmes; Bernhard Pfahringer; Peter Reutemann; Ian H. Witten (16 November 2009), The WEKA data mining software: an update, vol. 11, pp. 10–18, doi:10.1145/1656274.1656278, Wikidata Q105584187
  4. Ian H. Witten publications indexed by Google Scholar
  5. Ian H. Witten at DBLP Bibliography Server
  6. Ian H. Witten publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  7. "If You've Got Data, Mine It Yourself: Ian Witten on Data Mining, Weka, and his MOOC". 20 February 2014.
  8. "Ian H. Witten: Resume". Cs.waikato.ac.nz. Retrieved 14 March 2017.
  9. Witten, Ian H. (1976). Learning to control (PhD thesis). University of Essex. OCLC 42058261. ProQuest 301351543.
  10. Witten, I.H. (1977). "An Adaptive Optimal Controller for Discrete-Time Markov Environments". Information and Control. 34 (4): 286–295. doi:10.1016/s0019-9958(77)90354-0.
  11. Nevill-Manning, Craig G.; Witten, Ian H. (1997). "Identifying Hierarchical Structure in Sequences: A linear-time algorithm". Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. 7: 67–82. arXiv:cs/9709102. Bibcode:1997cs........9102N. doi:10.1613/jair.374. S2CID 2957960.
  12. Holmes, Geoffrey and Donkin, Andrew and Witten, Ian H (1994). "Weka: A machine learning workbench". Proc Australia and New Zealand Conference on Intelligent Information Systems. Brisbane, Australia: 357–361. doi:10.1109/ANZIIS.1994.396988.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  13. Witten, I.H., McNab, R.J., Boddie, S.J. and Bainbridge, D. (2000). "Greenstone: A comprehensive open-source digital library software system". Proc Digital Libraries 2000. San Antonio, Texas: 113–121.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  14. "Recipients". Retrieved 15 February 2021.
  15. "Current Fellows « Fellowship « The Academy « Our Organisation « Royal Society of New Zealand". Royalsociety.org.nz. 20 June 2014. Retrieved 14 March 2017.
  16. "IFIP-WG9.2 Namur Award". Prof. Jacques Berleur Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix. Archived from the original on 13 February 2021. Retrieved 30 September 2010.
  17. "Awards and Prizes - Department of Computer Science : University of Waikato". Cs.waikato.ac.nz. Retrieved 14 March 2017.
  18. Ian H. Witten; Eibe Frank (1 March 2002). "Data mining". ACM SIGMOD Record. 31 (1): 76. doi:10.1145/507338.507355. ISSN 0163-5808. Wikidata Q58561631.
  19. Communicating with Microcomputers. London, England: Academic Press. December 1980. ISBN 978-0-12-760750-4.
  20. Principles of Computer Speech. London, England: Academic Press. December 1982. ISBN 978-0-12-760760-3.
  21. Making Computers Talk: an Introduction to Speech Synthesis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. December 1986. ISBN 978-0-13-545690-3.
  22. Text Compression. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. December 1990. ISBN 978-0-13-911991-0.
  23. The Reactive Keyboard. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. December 1992. ISBN 978-0-52-140375-7.
  24. Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. December 1999. ISBN 978-1-55-860570-1.
  25. Web Dragons: Inside the Myths of Search Engine Technology. Morgan Kaufmann. November 2006. ISBN 978-0-12-370609-6.
  26. How to Build a Digital Library. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. December 2009. ISBN 978-0-12-374857-7.
  27. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques. Morgan Kaufmann. October 2016. ISBN 978-0-12-804357-8.



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