Matt Mahoney is a programmer and researcher on data compression

Data compression

In computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use....

, who is well known for creation of an open compression standard and API, libZPAQ

ZPAQ

ZPAQ is a proposed open format for highly compressed data, mainly created by Matt Mahoney. It is designed so that new compression algorithms may be developed without breaking compatibility with older versions of ZPAQ-compliant decompression programs. ZPAQ uses a configurable context mixing...

, which is released into Public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

, for the creation of data compressor, PAQ

PAQ

PAQ is a series of lossless data compression archivers that have evolved through collaborative development to top rankings on several benchmarks measuring compression ratio . Specialized versions of PAQ have won the Hutter Prize and the Calgary Challenge...

, which is released in GPLv3, and for creating the Hutter prize

Hutter Prize

The Hutter Prize is a cash prize funded by Marcus Hutter which rewards data compression improvements on a specific 100 MB English text file. Specifically, the prize awards 500 euros for each one percent improvement in the compressed size of the file enwik8, which is the smaller of two files used...

, and many other compression tools. He is working as a technology strategist at Ocarina Networks, (a division of Dell) specializing in data compression research.