R, the popular Machine Learning programming language was co-founded by a Kiwi, Ross Ihaka.

New Zealand has a long and well documented relationship with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning development. New Zealand’s Universities like the University of Canterbury, Waikato University, University of Auckland and the Auckland University of Technology are flush with world leading Professors and Lecturers in Computer Science, Engineering and Statistics.

Ross Ihaka is one of the Grand Fathers of Machine Learning languages having co-founded the R programming language, he’s a New Zealander I’m just learning about and hope to interview or have speak at one of our up-coming events.

Ross was an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Auckland until his retirement in 2017.

Ross completed his undergraduate education at the University of Auckland, and obtained his PhD in 1985 from the University of California, Berkeley. His thesis was titled Ruaumoko, after the Māori god of earthquakes, volcanoes and seasons. Along with Robert Gentleman, he is one of the originators of the R programming language.

In 2008, he received the Pickering Medal, awarded by the Royal Society of New Zealand, for his work on R. As of 2010, he was working on a new statistical programming language based on Lisp. The Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland started a public lecture series in his honour in 2017.

The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis.  Polls, data mining surveys, and studies of scholarly literature databases show substantial increases in popularity; as of July 2020, R ranks 8th in the TIOBE index, a measure of popularity of programming languages.

So who are some of the other New Zealanders leading AI research and commercialistion here or around the world.

Internationally regarded AI researcher in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Founder of Quid and Primer, Sean Gourley who spoke at AI Day 2019 was born in Christchurch. Sean is a Physicist, decathlete, political advisor, and TED fellow. Sean studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he received a PhD for his research on the mathematical patterns that underlie modern war. This research has taken him all over the world from the Pentagon, to the United Nations and Iraq. Previously Sean worked at NASA on self-repairing nano-circuits. Watch Seans TED Talk - The Mathmatics of war

Professor Michael Whitbrock at the University of Auckland returned to New Zealand a few years ago to build the Broad AI Lab and is on the AI Forum board and Chairperson to the AI for Good Foundation (ai4good.org).

Craig Nevill-Manning is a New Zealand computer scientist who founded Google's first remote engineering center, where he was an Engineering Director. He also invented Froogle (now Google Shopping), a product search engine. He is now Head of Engineering at Sidewalk Labs. Nevill-Manning graduated with a BSc in computer science from the University of Canterbury. He received his PhD from the University of Waikato where he was a co-creator of the Weka machine learning suite and the Greenstone digital library software. In 1994, he invented the sequitur algorithm, which uses data compression to infer the structure of a sequence of symbols.

Dr Olivia Erdelyi is a lecturer and the University of Canterbury. She has a multidisciplinary background in artificial intelligence (AI), economics, law, and political science, Olivia is interested in developing sustainable policies to enable beneficial development and societal adoption of emerging technologies, in particular AI. Olivia is member of the OECD Expert Group on AI "AIGO" and the AI forum of New Zealand's working group "Forging a Coordinated AI Strategy for New Zealand and The Global Partnership for AI." 

I’m excited to say there are many many more amazing New Zealander’s working in AI. I look forward to profiling and sharing them on our website in future posts, video interviews and events.