Martin F. Porter is the

inventor An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea, or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an ...

of the Porter Stemmer, one of the most common algorithms for stemming English, and the

Snowball A snowball is a sphere, spherical object made from snow, usually created by scooping snow with the hands and pressing the snow together to compact it into a ball. Snowballs are often used in games such as snowball fights. A snowball may also be ...

programming framework. His 1980 paper "An algorithm for suffix stripping", proposing the stemming algorithm, has been cited over 8000 times (Google Scholar). The Muscat search engine comes from research performed by Porter at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

and was commercialized in 1984 by Cambridge CD Publishing; it was subsequently sold to MAID which became the Dialog Corporation. Part of Dialog was then spun off to become BrightStation in 2000, which transitioned Open Muscat to a closed-source development model in 2001. Subsequently, a group of developers led by Porter initiated a project based on Open Muscat called Xapian and released the first official version on September 30, 2002. In 2000 he was awarded the

Tony Kent Strix award The UKeiG Strix award is an annual award for outstanding contributions to the field of information retrieval and is presented in memory of Dr. Tony Kent, a past Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists (IIS), who died in 1997. Tony Kent ma ...

. Porter read mathematics at

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College, formally the College of St John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge, founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch L ...

(1963–66) and went to get a Diploma in Computer Science (1967) and a PhD. at Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He worked at the

University of Leeds The University of Leeds is a public research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It was established in 1874 as the Yorkshire College of Science. In 1884, it merged with the Leeds School of Medicine (established 1831) and was renamed Y ...

for a year before returning to Cambridge's ''Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre'' (1971-1974) and at the

Sedgwick Museum The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, is the geology museum of the University of Cambridge. It is part of the Department of Earth Sciences and is located on the university's Downing Site in Downing Street, central Cambridge, England. The Sedg ...

as a programmer (1974-1976). In 1977, he became the Director of the Museum Documentation Advisory Unit (MDA). Martin Porter is co-founder with John Snyder of the contextual targeting and content recommendation company, Grapeshot. John Snyder is listed as CEO and Martin Porter is listed as Chief Scientist. Grapeshot took £250,000 in UK government subsidies and subsequently raised £16m from UK investors.
Parliamentary Review 2018 - Grapeshot On May 15, 2018,

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

completed the acquisition of Grapeshot.

References

External links

Martin Porter's personal homepage
Living people 1944 births Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Academics of the University of Leeds {{compu-bio-stub