Chapter 9: Ian H. Witten: A Stroll Through the Gardens of Computer Science

Ian Witten, http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ihw/, is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. His many research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression and programming by demonstration. As head of the New Zealand Digital Library Research Group http://www.nzdl.org/cgi-bin/library.cgi, Professor Witten oversaw the development of Greenstone Digital Library software, used by the BBC, New York Botanical Gardens and UNESCO. He has written several books, the latest being Data Mining (2000), How to Build a Digital Library (2002) and Web Dragons: Inside the Myths of Search Engine Technology (2007). His Birthday Book, 2007 (http://www.nzdl.org/Books/Birthday/index.html) includes contributions from collaborators, friends and students, from all around the world. Professor Witten is a Fellow of the ACM and the Royal Society of New Zealand. He was awarded the IFIP Namur Prize (2004) for “contributions to the awareness of social implications of information technology… and the need for a holistic approach in the use of information technology that takes account of social implications”, and won the 2010 World Class New Zealand Award. In 2012 he was appointed Chief Scientific Advisor at Pingar http://www.pingar.com to provide advice on developing technologies and solutions to augment enterprise ability to manage unstructured data…