Professor Ian Witten is appointed Chief Scientific Advisor at Pingar
Pingar to increase research investment & focus, developing advanced solutions for enterprise content management of unstructured data
TAURANGA, New Zealand. – August 20, 2012 – Pingar, a leading provider of unstructured data management solutions, today announced the appointment of Professor Ian
Witten to the role of Chief Scientific Advisor.
Professor Witten's work at the University of Waikato has established New Zealand as an international leader in the
provision of digital library and data mining software As head of the University’s New Zealand Digital Library Research
Group, Professor Witten oversaw the development of Greenstone Digital Library software, used by the BBC, New York
Botanical Gardens and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). Professor Witten
will provide advice to Pingar’s research team, focusing on developing technologies and solutions to augment enterprise
content management solutions’ ability to manage unstructured data.
Peter Wren-Hilton, CEO of Pingar, says that Professor Witten’s appointment as Chief Scientific Advisor will help Pingar
expand their growing foothold in the content management and document management markets
“This is an exciting journey for Pingar particularly in the area of enterprise content and document management. As
businesses struggle to make sense and derive business advantage from the growing tide of both structured and
unstructured content, they are looking for solutions from their existing systems. Pingar is currently conducting
extensive research into building new ground-breaking taxonomy and metadata generation solutions. Ian’s deep
understanding of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Computational Linguistics and Witten’s extensive
network will help Pingar to rapidly advance its research into these core technologies.” Mr. Wren Hilton continues.
Professor Witten is one of the world’s most recognised authorities on data mining and digital libraries. A recipient of
the 2010 World Class New Zealand Awards, Professor Witten has written extensively on these subjects and is a regular speaker
at international conferences and seminars.
“Pingar is currently engaged in some very innovative areas of research,” said Professor Witten. “I look forward to
working with the Pingar research team to help identify ways in which they can deploy new skills and techniques to help
enterprises manage the exponential growth of unstructured data.”
About the Pingar API
The Pingar API works seamlessly with existing enterprise content management systems and increases the power and
usefulness of your enterprise information. Pingar’s process is intuitive and yields more contextually relevant results
and tools to extract information and transform that information into intelligence. The decision to release Pingar’s base
technology as 18 core API components has resulted in significant market traction and is providing major opportunities
for future growth across multiple domains.
About Pingar
Pingar’s mission is to transform unstructured data in the enterprise into business intelligence by developing technology
that harnesses the power of text mining, natural language processing and machine learning This mission came from years
of ground-breaking research at some of the most respected universities in these fields. Pingar is headquartered in New
Zealand with offices in Hong Kong, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. For more information please see www.pingar.com