Ian H. Witten (born 4 March 1947 in Horsham, Sussex, England) is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

at the

University of Waikato The University of Waikato ( mi, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato), is a Public university, public research university in Hamilton, New Zealand, Hamilton, New Zealand established in 1964. An additional campus is located in Tauranga. The university perfo ...

, New Zealand. He is a Chartered Engineer with the Institute of Electrical Engineers in London who graduated from the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

with a BA and MA (First Class Honours) in mathematics in 1969 and an M.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from the

University of Calgary The University of Calgary (U of C or UCalgary) is a public research university located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The University of Calgary started in 1944 as the Calgary branch of the University of Alberta, founded in 1908, prior to being ins ...

, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar, in 1970. He received his Ph.D. for ''Learning to Control'' in 1976 from the

University of Essex The University of Essex is a public university, public research university in Essex, England. Established by royal charter in 1965, Essex is one of the original plate glass university, plate glass universities. Essex's shield consists of the an ...

, England (Electrical Engineering Science). Witten discovered

temporal-difference learning Temporal difference (TD) learning refers to a class of model-free reinforcement learning methods which learn by bootstrapping from the current estimate of the value function. These methods sample from the environment, like Monte Carlo methods, a ...

, inventing the tabular TD(0), the first temporal-difference learning rule for reinforcement learning. Witten is a co-creator of the

Sequitur algorithm Sequitur (or Nevill-Manning algorithm) is a recursive algorithm developed by Craig Nevill-Manning and Ian H. Witten in 1997 that infers a hierarchical structure (context-free grammar) from a sequence of discrete symbols. The algorithm operates in li ...

and conceived and obtained funding for the development of the original

WEKA The weka, also known as the Māori hen or woodhen (''Gallirallus australis'') is a flightless bird species of the rail family. It is endemic to New Zealand. It is the only extant member of the genus ''Gallirallus''. Four subspecies are recognize ...

software package for data mining. Witten further made considerable contributions to the field of compression, creating novel algorithms for text and image compression with

Alistair Moffat Alistair Murray Moffat (born 16 June 1950, Kelso, Scotland) is a Scottish writer and journalist, former director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and former Rector of the University of St Andrews. Education Moffat graduated from the Universit ...

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. Witten was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1996 and a Fellow of the

Royal Society of New Zealand Royal may refer to: People * Royal (name), a list of people with either the surname or given name * A member of a royal family Places United States * Royal, Arkansas, an unincorporated community * Royal, Illinois, a village * Royal, Iowa, a cit ...

in 1997. In 2004 he received the

International Federation for Information Processing The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) is a global organisation for researchers and professionals working in the field of computing to conduct research, develop standards and promote information sharing. Established in 196 ...

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" and in 2005 the

Hector Medal for contributions to many areas of computer science.

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External links

* http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ihw Academic homepage * Living people People from Hamilton, New Zealand New Zealand computer scientists University of Calgary faculty University of Waikato faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the Royal Society of New Zealand Alumni of the University of Cambridge University of Calgary alumni 1947 births {{compu-scientist-stub

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