Geoffrey Holmes is currently Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Waikato. He has been head of the machine learning group and has been involved in several open source projects over the last 20 years. He has made contributions in machine learning across several branches of the subject and has been active in finding ways to reward researchers for their efforts to produce open source software. In this regard he acts as an action editor for the branch of JMLR dedicated to open source software. He was part of the team that in 2005 won the SIGKDD Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Service Award for Weka and regularly serves on senior PCs for KDD, ECMLPKDD and Discovery Science.

He obtained BSc and PhD degrees in Mathematics from Southampton University, UK in 1986. After time as a research assistant in Cambridge University he joined Waikato in 1987, after moving up the ranks, he was promoted to Professor in 2008.