Ian Witten

FRSNZ
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
Died5 May 2023(2023-05-05) (aged 76)
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

Ian Hugh Witten (4 March 1947 – 5 May 2023) 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]

Early life and education

Witten was born in Horsham, Sussex, England, on 4 March 1947.[8] He 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.[9] He received his PhD in 1976 from the University of Essex.[10]

In 1971, Witten married Pamela Foden at the Chapel of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. The couple went on to have two daughters.[8]

Career and research

Witten discovered temporal-difference learning, inventing the tabular TD(0),[11] the first temporal-difference learning rule for reinforcement learning. Witten was a co-creator of the Sequitur algorithm[12] and conceived and obtained funding for the development of the original WEKA software package for data mining.[3][13] 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.[14]

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

Awards and honours

Witten was elected a ACM Fellow in 1996[15] and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ) in 1997.[16]

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"[17] and in 2005 the Hector Medal for contributions to many areas of computer science.[18]

Later life and death

Witten retired from the University of Waikato in 2014, and was accorded the title of professor emeritus.[8] He was diagnosed with cancer in November 2022, and died on 5 May 2023.[8]

Publications

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

  • Data mining: practical machine learning tools and techniques with Java implementations[19]
  • Communicating with Microcomputers[20]
  • Principles of Computer Speech[21]
  • Making Computers Talk: an Introduction to Speech Synthesis[22]
  • Text Compression[23]
  • The Reactive Keyboard[24]
  • Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images[25]
  • Web Dragons: Inside the Myths of Search Engine Technology[26]
  • How to Build a Digital Library[27]
  • Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques[28]

References

  1. ↑ "Honorary graduate cumulative list". Retrieved 15 February 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Ian Witten at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. 1 2 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. 1 2 3 Ian Witten publications indexed by Google Scholar
  5. 1 2 Ian Witten at DBLP Bibliography Server
  6. 1 2 Ian 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. 1 2 3 4 Swainson, Richard (3 June 2023). "Computing pioneer came to call New Zealand home". The Post. Retrieved 27 August 2023.
  9. ↑ "Ian H. Witten: Resume". Cs.waikato.ac.nz. Retrieved 14 March 2017.
  10. ↑ Witten, Ian H. (1976). Learning to control (PhD thesis). University of Essex. OCLC 42058261. ProQuest 301351543.
  11. ↑ Witten, Ian 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.
  12. ↑ Craig G., Nevill-Manning; 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.
  13. ↑ Holmes, Geoffrey; Donkin, Andrew; Witten, Ian H. (1994). "WEKA: A machine learning workbench". Proceedings of ANZIIS '94 - Australian New Zealnd Intelligent Information Systems Conference. Brisbane, Australia. pp. 357–361. doi:10.1109/ANZIIS.1994.396988. hdl:10289/1138. ISBN 0-7803-2404-8. S2CID 17629797.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  14. ↑ Witten, Ian H.; McNab, R. J.; Boddie, S. J.; Bainbridge, D. (2000). "Greenstone: A comprehensive open-source digital library software system". Proc Digital Libraries 2000. San Antonio, Texas: 113–121.
  15. ↑ "Recipients". Retrieved 15 February 2021.
  16. ↑ "Current Fellows". Royal Society of New Zealand. 20 June 2014. Retrieved 14 March 2017.
  17. ↑ "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.
  18. ↑ "Awards and Prizes". Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato. Retrieved 14 March 2017.
  19. ↑ 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.
  20. ↑ Communicating with Microcomputers. London, England: Academic Press. December 1980. ISBN 978-0-12-760750-4.
  21. ↑ Principles of Computer Speech. London, England: Academic Press. December 1982. ISBN 978-0-12-760760-3.
  22. ↑ Making Computers Talk: an Introduction to Speech Synthesis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. December 1986. ISBN 978-0-13-545690-3.
  23. ↑ Text Compression. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. December 1990. ISBN 978-0-13-911991-0.
  24. ↑ The Reactive Keyboard. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. December 1992. ISBN 978-0-52-140375-7.
  25. ↑ Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. December 1999. ISBN 978-1-55-860570-1.
  26. ↑ Web Dragons: Inside the Myths of Search Engine Technology. Morgan Kaufmann. November 2006. ISBN 978-0-12-370609-6.
  27. ↑ How to Build a Digital Library. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. December 2009. ISBN 978-0-12-374857-7.
  28. ↑ Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques. Morgan Kaufmann. October 2016. ISBN 978-0-12-804357-8.
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