Ian Witten
Also known as Ian H. Witten
Ian Witten was a computer scientist whose 1977 work introduced an early rule for reinforcement learning. At Waikato, he worked on machine learning and digital libraries, co-wrote Managing Gigabytes on data compression and indexing, and contributed to Weka and Greenstone. He taught Data Mining with Weka in the first MOOC from a New Zealand university. ACM named him a Fellow in 1996; he received the IFIP Namur Award in 2004 and the Hector Medal in 2005. He retired as an emeritus professor in 2014 and died in 2023.
Timeline
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1969–1976
Studying across three universities
He earned a BA and MA in mathematics at Cambridge in 1969, an MSc in mathematics and computer science at Calgary in 1970, and a PhD at Essex in 1976.
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1977
An early learning rule
His 1977 paper described an adaptive optimal controller for discrete-time Markov environments and introduced tabular TD(0), a temporal-difference rule for reinforcement learning.
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1992–1994
A move to Waikato
He joined the University of Waikato from Canada in 1992 and worked in machine learning, data mining and digital libraries. In 1994, he and collaborators published Managing Gigabytes, a book on compressing and indexing documents and images.
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1996
Weka and an ACM fellowship
Waikato released the first Weka software in 1996, and ACM named him a Fellow in 1996. Weka became a widely used open-source data-mining tool.
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1997
Building a digital library
Greenstone, his digital-library software, had its first open-source release in 1997.
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2004–2005
Honours for computing
He received IFIP's Namur Award in 2004 and the Royal Society Te Apārangi Hector Medal in 2005. In 2005, the Weka team he led with Eibe Frank won ACM SIGKDD's Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Service Award.
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2013
Teaching data mining online
He presented Data Mining with Weka in the first MOOC from a New Zealand university.
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2014–2023
Emeritus years
He retired from Waikato in 2014 and became an emeritus professor. He died in 2023.
Sources and credits
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