PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Eibe Frank

Eibe Frank is a professor at the University of Waikato whose work connects machine learning with software such as WEKA. He helped develop the 1999 WEKA 3.1.6 release, published a 2004 ICML paper on nested dichotomies, and coauthored a 2010 account of the open-source project. In 2025, he coauthored the fifth edition of Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques; with Sabino Francesco Roselli, he studied optimal model trees for classification and regression. As of October 2026, he is a professor and co-director of the university's Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Links
Website and Google Scholar

Timeline

  1. 1999

    The WEKA 3.1.6 release

    In 1999, he co-develops WEKA 3.1.6, a Java program for machine learning, with Mark Hall and other contributors.

  2. 2004

    Nested dichotomies for multiclass learning

    In 2004, he and Stefan Kramer publish an ICML paper on nested dichotomies for multiclass problems. They model each multiclass problem as a tree of binary classification tasks and report more accurate results than direct C4.5 and logistic regression.

  3. 2010

    A history of WEKA

    In 2010, he coauthors a history of WEKA, a popular machine-learning workbench with nearly two decades of development. The account reviews project-management and historical decisions about the software's uptake.

  4. 2025

    A fifth edition of Data Mining

    In 2025, he coauthors the fifth edition of Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques with James Foulds, Ian Witten, Mark Hall, and Christopher Pal. The book includes an appendix that introduces WEKA and links its algorithms to the software.

  5. 2025–2026

    Optimal model trees

    In 2025, he and Sabino Francesco Roselli post a study of optimal model trees, which use linear combinations of predictor variables in tree leaves. Scientific Reports publishes it in 2026 as an interpretable machine-learning approach for classification and regression.

  6. As of October 2026

    Professor and AI institute co-director

    As of October 2026, he is a professor and co-director of the University of Waikato's Artificial Intelligence Institute.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Eibe Frank yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. WEKA 3.1.6 README cs.tufts.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Weka 3 - Data Mining with Open Source Machine Learning Software in Java ml.cms.waikato.ac.nz. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Ensembles of Nested Dichotomies for Multi-class Problems icml.cc. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. WEKA−Experiences with a Java Open-Source Project jmlr.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Data Mining - Edition 5 - By James Foulds, Ph.D., Ian H. Witten, Eibe Frank, Mark A. Hall and Christopher J. Pal educate.elsevier.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Experiments with Optimal Model Trees arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. Experiments with optimal model trees nature.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. About the Artificial Intelligence Institute waikato.ac.nz. Checked 19 October 2026.