John G. Cleary

John Gerald Cleary (19 October 1950 – 16 January 2014) was a New Zealand-Canadian professor of computer science, entrepreneur, politician and promoter of Transcendental Meditation.

Cleary received his secondary education at St Thomas of Canterbury College, Christchurch. and attended Canterbury University, attaining a B.Sc. (Hons), MSc and PhD, before teaching at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. After working in the private sector in Canada, he returned to New Zealand to the University of Waikato, an association he maintained for the rest of his life.

His most cited work is in the fields of data compression, machine learning, and logic programming. In particular, he independently discovered arithmetic coding and invented the prediction by partial matching (PPM) compression technique.

From 1999 until his death in 2014, Cleary worked with several of his former students through a succession of companies on a variety of problems including document classification, named-entity recognition, sequence alignment, SNV calling from NGS data, and various problems in metagenomics.

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