Craig Graham Nevill-Manning (né Nevill)[1] is a New Zealand computer scientist who founded Google's first remote engineering centre, located in midtown Manhattan, where he was an Engineering Director. He also created Froogle (now Google Shopping), a product search engine. He is now Head of Engineering at Sidewalk Labs.[2]
Nevill-Manning graduated with a BSc in computer science from the University of Canterbury. He received his PhD from the University of Waikato[3] where he was a co-creator of the Weka machine learning suite and the Greenstone digital library software.[4] His doctoral advisor was Ian Witten.[5] In 1994, he invented the sequitur algorithm, which uses data compression to infer the structure of a sequence of symbols.
Craig was invited to join Google at its formation but declined and then joined a little later on. [6]
Prior to joining Google in 2001 as a senior research scientist, he was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University, and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Biochemistry department at Stanford University. His research interests centre on using techniques from machine learning, data compression and computational biology to provide more structured search over information.
In 2016, Nevill-Manning joined Alphabet, Inc. subsidiary Sidewalk Labs as CTO.[7]
In 2010 Nevill-Manning received a distinguished alumni award from the University of Waikato.[8]
In 2009 he won a World Class New Zealand Award in the Information and Communications category.[9]
In his own time Craig manages a website service that puts Olympic glory in proportion. He asks: "Who leads the world in medals when you correct for population? That is, which country wins the most medals per capita?" His site, which is updated daily during the Olympics, provides the answer: https://medalspercapita.com/