Prof. Ian Witten Professor of Computer Science, University of Waikato, New Zealand

Ian Witten's research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He has published widely in these areas, including several books, the most recent being Managing Gigabytes (1999), How to build a digital library (2003), Data Mining (2005) and Web Dragons (2007), all from Morgan Kaufmann.... read moreHe received an MA in mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in computer science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in electrical engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He received the 2004 IFIP Namur Award, a biennial honor accorded for 'outstanding contribution with international impact to the awareness of social implications of information and communication technology' and the 2005 SIGKDD Service Award for 'an outstanding contribution to the data mining field' and in 2006 the Royal Society of New Zealand Hector Medal for 'an outstanding contribution to the advancement of the mathematical and information sciences'.