How a little NZ university helped to kickstart the world AI boom

This is the story of how a little corner of New Zealand / Aotearoa changed the world, and a eulogy of sorts for Professor Ian Witten who passed away in 2023.

For this part of the story it started when Ian Witten came to NZ to join the University of Waikato. He was originally from the UK, via Canada. He was an amazing person who gave so much to everyone and knew how to bring the best out of everyone. You can read an obituary of him here.

One of Ian’s students was Craig Nevill-Manning who then relocated to Stanford as a post-doc and he had a couple of students called Larry and Sergei. They asked him to be a cofounder of their company called “Google” based on his and Ian’s work. He declined at that time and then joined a couple of years later. You can read more here and this is also based on my personal conversations with him.

Some years later Deep Mind was formed and one of the cofounders was Shane Legg who studied at Waikato — he did the same under grad degree as me, just after I completed mine. He met the other two cofounders at University College of London (UCL) as documented here and here. He worked with Ian on WEKA and published research papers together. WEKA was named after a flightless bird in NZ, and was one of the pioneering pieces of open source software that the ML/AI revolution was built upon. Later on Deep Mind was acquired by Google.

One of the other cofounders of Deep Mind was Mustafa Suleyman, and he went on to cofound Inflection AI. Mustafa, and many of his team, have now joined Microsoft to head up their AI.

So both Microsoft and Google AI are now heavily influenced by people from Waikato, and from the work of Ian Witten. There are probably many other stories too e.g. a PhD student I studied alongside, Alyona Medelyan, worked closely with Ian and has build a successful startup using AI called Thematic.

As a side note the story could have become a lot more personal, and could have led to Waikato University become even more important to the world. I was doing my PhD starting 2005 at the university, and in 2007 I wrote a proposal and worked with Ian Witten on this for Google to start a research lab in New Zealand based at the university. You can read this proposal here and I was positioning myself as the leader.

Apparently Larry and Sergei were quite keen on the idea, but it stalled for a while and it transpired that they were comparing Australia and NZ and they decided to focus more on Australia as they’d acquired in 2004 what became Google Maps from Australia.

Waikato University also has given so many things to other research also, and those might be a story for another day.