Ian H. Witten

Ian H. Witten is a computer scientist at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He is a Chartered Engineer with the Institute of Electrical Engineers in London who graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA and MA in mathematics in 1969 and an M.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from the University of Calgary, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar, in 1970. He received his Ph.D. for Learning to Control in 1976 from the University of Essex, England. Witten discovered temporal-difference learning, inventing the tabular TD(0), the first temporal-difference learning rule for reinforcement learning. Witten is a co-creator of the Sequitur algorithm and conceived and obtained funding for the development of the original WEKA 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 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.