The New Zealand Government has awarded NZ$13 million ($12.1 million) in funding to the University of Waikato for a new research project aimed at helping New Zealanders solve the nation's critical environmental problems. The funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment's Strategic Science Investment Fund will be spread over seven years. It will be used to support the university's Time-Evolving Data Science/Artificial Intelligence for Advanced Open Environmental Science (TAIAO) project. The TAIAO project will involve the development of new machine learning methods for time series and data streams tailored to processing large quantities of data collected on the New Zealand environment. It is being conducted as part of a collaboration between the Universities of Waikato, Auckland and Canterbury, Beca and MetService. It has the participation of highly qualified data scientists, data engineers and environmental scientists.

Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He received an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand.