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.

Academics

Cleary received his secondary education at St Thomas of Canterbury College, Christchurch.[1] and attended Canterbury University, attaining a B.Sc. (Hons), MSc and PhD,[2] 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,[2] 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.[3] In particular, he independently discovered arithmetic coding and invented the prediction by partial matching (PPM) compression technique.[4]

Commercial ventures

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.

Cleary worked from 1999 to 2001 with Webmind, Inc.[5]

Cleary was a co-founder of ReelTwo (2001-2007) which developed high-speed genomic search software.[6] ReelTwo was bought out by NetValue in 2007.[7]

Cleary was Chief Technology Officer of Real Time Genomics (2013-2014)[5] During his time at Real Time Genomics, he was instrumental in the development of Bayesian algorithms for the calling of genomic variants in the presence of a pedigree.[8]

Transcendental Meditation

Cleary was involved in the Transcendental Meditation movement, including standing for their party, the Natural Law Party of New Zealand, in the 1996 election[9] for the Hamilton East electorate and was fourth on the party list.[10] In the 1999 election standing in the same electorate, he won 96 votes, 0.30% of the total in the electorate; the party again won no seats.[11]

Death

Cleary died on 16 January 2014 following a short illness.[12]

gollark: Yes. They're actually quite bad.
gollark: We configured that across APIONET.
gollark: 16.
gollark: Ugh, fiiiine, send more if you want.
gollark: Well, we obliterated all nearby LyricTech™ forces trivially, which I think counts?

References
  1. "Auckland Grammar Top Scholarship School", The New Zealand Herald, 24 January 1968, p. 2.
  2. "SCMS > Computer Science: Staff (A to I)". Cs.waikato.ac.nz. Archived from the original on 2 February 2014. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
  3. "JG Cleary - Google Scholar". Scholar.google.co.nz. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
  4. Timothy C. Bell; John G. Cleary; Ian H. Witten (1990). Text Compression. Prentice-Hall.
  5. "Management Team". Real Time Genomics. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
  6. Gardner, Chris (9 March 2009). "Software venture hunting staff". Stuff.co.nz. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
  7. Wolfe, Felicity (19 July 2010). "Waikato's NetValue buys WebSpring". Stuff.co.nz. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
  8. John G. Cleary, Ross Braithwaite, Kurt Gaastra, Brian S. Hilbush, Stuart Inglis, Sean A. Irvine, Alan Jackson, Richard Littin, Sahar Nohzadeh-Malakshah, Mehul Rathod, David Ware, Len Trigg, Francisco M. De La Vega (2014). "Joint Variant and De Novo Mutation Identification on Pedigrees from High-Throughput Sequencing Data", Journal of Computational Biology, 21(6), 405-419.
  9. "Natural Law Party issues list « Science in the News « News « Royal Society of New Zealand". Royalsociety.org.nz. 14 September 1996. Archived from the original on 19 February 2014. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
  10. "Electorate Candidate and Party Votes Recorded at Each Polling Place - Hamilton East" (PDF). Retrieved 2 July 2013.
  11. "1999 GENERAL ELECTION - Results". Electionresults.govt.nz. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
  12. "John Gerald CLEARY Obituary: View John CLEARY's Obituary by New Zealand Herald". Notices.nzherald.co.nz. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
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