Craig Nevill-Manning

Craig Graham Nevill-Manning, born Craig Nevill, is a New Zealand computer scientist who founded Google's first remote engineering centre, in midtown Manhattan, where he is a Distinguished Engineer. He created Froogle, now Google Shopping, a product search engine, and was chief technology officer and head of engineering at Sidewalk Labs from 2016 to 2022. He graduated in computer science from the University of Canterbury and received his doctorate from the University of Waikato, where he was a co-creator of the Weka machine learning suite and the Greenstone digital library software under the supervision of Ian Witten. He is a developer of the Sequitur algorithm, which uses data compression to infer the structure of a sequence of symbols. Before joining Google in 2001 he was an assistant professor at Rutgers University and a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at Stanford University, and his research centres on machine learning, data compression and computational biology applied to structured search. He won a World Class New Zealand Award in 2009 and a distinguished alumni award from the University of Waikato in 2010.