Computing pioneer came to call New Zealand home
‘Ib March 4, 1947 d May 5, 2023
t’s great being a professor, your students do all your work for you – they’re brilliant.’’ The occasion was the 2010 Kea awards, the speaker Ian Witten. He was delivering what compere Maggie Barry described as ‘‘the most comprehensive thanking speech of the night’’.
Recognised for work ‘‘that had helped establish New Zealand as an international leader in the provision of digital library software’’, Witten largely deflected praise.
He thanked family, university and his adopted country, acknowledged funding agencies and claimed that ‘‘the brains behind this project belong to my graduate students, research staff and colleagues’’.
If there was any pride in the recognition it rested on the fact that ‘‘work that I do is largely philanthropic in nature’’. Witten’s collaborative project, the Greenstone Library Digital Software, open source software designed to compress vast amounts of data in userfriendly, accessible ways, was adopted by the likes of the BBC and the New York Botanical Garden but also Unesco, in more than 60 countries.
His aim was to ‘‘empower people to create their own information systems’’. Māori were among the first to benefit.
With a different character and in a different context, Witten could well have become another tech billionaire. An eternal optimist, known for his loud, distinctive laugh, he chose instead to live most of his professional life in Waikato, enriching the region, the country and ultimately the world.
Much more than a hard-working, truly inspired, world-class academic, Witten was a family man, a life-long musician and yachtsman, an adventurous hiker and habitual traveller, an imaginative mixer and consumer of cocktails, an amateur sketch artist and an uncompromising wearer of sandals.
Ian Hugh Witten was born in Horsham, in the English county of Sussex, the second of the three children.
He was awarded a scholarship to study at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in mathematics and, following the convention of the college, had a Master of Arts bestowed upon him four years later. .
Taking up a lectureship position in 1970 in the Department of Electrical Engineering Science at the University of Essex, he began studying toward his PhD and a chartered engineer qualification.
While at Cambridge he had met Pamela (nee Foden). Ian and Pam were married in 1971 in the Chapel at Gonville and Caius College. Daughter Anna was born in 1977 and Nicola (Nikki) three years later.
In 1976 Witten both completed his PhD and graduated as a chartered engineer from the Institute of Electrical Engineers, London.
Having enjoyed sabbaticals to New Zealand in 1977 and 1986 as an Erskine Fellow, in 1992 Witten made an informed decision to relocate to the antipodes, becoming the Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waikato.
He would later describe the university as providing ‘‘a wonderful basis for an international research career’’ and a ‘‘wonderful environment to develop in the
ways I wanted to develop’’.
Witten’s innovations in the field of indexing and compressing computer text played a seminal role in the development of computer search engines internationally. He discovered temporaldifference learning, inventing the tabular TD(0), the first temporal-difference learning rule for reinforcement learning.
He was a co-creator of the Sequitur algorithm and conceived and obtained funding for the development of the Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA), a free software package for data mining, the companion software to his groundbreaking, coauthored book Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, first published in 1999 and subsequently
updated in two later editions.
A co-founder of the Greenstone Digital Library Software and the language learning systems FLAX, he made a major contribution in the digital libraries field.
In 2013, he created the first Massive Online Course (MOOC) from a New Zealand university, facilitating and teaching users about WEKA, creating YouTube videos that have been viewed millions of times.
According to longtime colleague and friend Mark Apperley, Witten’s research strengths were complemented by a strong belief in the power of collaboration and the understanding and facilitating of team building, challenging colleagues and students alike.
Offering a heady mix of intelligence and unstinting optimism, he had the capacity to identify how things could be done, inspiring and guiding in equal measure, winning funding and building networks both within the university and beyond.
A true visionary, he encouraged all who knew him to have greater expectations of themselves and of each other.
Witten was responsible for winning five Marsden scholarships, contributing $7 million toward research at the University of Waikato. He supervised more than 40 doctoral and graduate students and played an innovative role in promoting graduate research, helping establish national conferences.
The co-author of 20 books, including Managing Gigabytes (1994), an acknowledged influence upon the development of the Google search engine, in a 42-year academic career he co-wrote over 130 articles in peer-reviewed journals, presenting a like number of conference papers.
In 2004 Witten won the International Federation of Information Processing Namur Award. The following year he was the recipient of the Royal Society Te Aparangi Hector Medal. In 2010 he won the Kea Award for Science, Technology and Academia. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Upon his retirement in 2014, Witten was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor. In 2017 he was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the Open University in the United Kingdom.
Beyond academia, Witten indulged his many passions. A longtime clarinetist with the Trust Waikato Symphony Orchestra(TWS0), he also formed and sustained smaller groups, playing both classical and jazz music, rehearsing regularly and organising the occasional gig with close attention to detail.
In retirement, he also graced the woodwind section of the Waikato Diocesan School for Girls’ Orchestra.
A skilled sailor and navigator, Witten’s pride and joy was Beulah, a 30-foot yacht on which he hosted family and friends, sailing the coastline of the North Island, often anchoring overnight. The vessel was a site of clarinet playing and the consumption of Witten’s recreational drink of first choice, the martini.
Frequent travellers throughout Witten’s professional life, in retirement he and Pam sustained the tradition with Tuesday excursions around Waikato.
Witten also joined a sketching group, which met at the Hamilton Gardens, biking the distance from his rural residence, preferring to draw anything but flowers.
When Witten was diagnosed with cancer in November 2022, he faced the news with trademark optimism, electing to grasp every opportunity to enjoy family and fun. In the same month, a clarinetheavy programme with the TWSO proved a challenge, one he got through with what a friend describes as ‘‘an extraordinary sense of character and purpose’’.
Character and purpose were traits that defined a man who helped shape 21st century technology, a man of curiosity, industry and much laughter.
He is survived by Pam, daughters Anna and Nikki and grandchildren Stella and Riley.