The iNZight Team

The iNZightVIT project is led by Professor Chris Wild from the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland. He comes up with the big (and small) ideas that make iNZight intuitive and easy to learn. Since 2018, Andrew Sporle from iNZight Analytics Ltd has contributed ideas and funding support for extending iNZight's capabilities for use in research and official statistics.

The development of iNZight itself comes from the work of many statistics students from the university, most working part-time or as part of a research project.


Current Team

Tom Elliott

Tom started working on iNZight in 2013, and is the lead developer and maintainer. He has worked on all of the iNZight packages to varying degrees. After completing a PhD at the University of Auckland (2015–2020), he is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at The School of Health, Victoria University of Wellington, although he remains based in Auckland.

Core responsibilities:

  • Maintainenance of the iNZight R repository and Github reposititories for all packages
  • Windows installer
  • Technical support for users
  • Development and maintainenance of the website
  • Oversees summer students and helps to implement their work
  • Maintenance and urgent bug fixes in iNZight Lite
Charco Hui

Charco is a PhD student at the University of Auckland and recently joined the iNZight team as our Lite developer. He will be responsible for maintenance and development of iNZight Lite, and providing email support to our users.

Chris Wild

Chris is the founder of iNZight and has been at his helm ever since. His strong ties with statistical education have helped guide the direction of development, and he has provided mentorship to all of iNZight's student (and other) developers.

These days, Chris is usually off enjoying his well-earned retirement, but continues to provide direction and oversight of iNZight.

Andrew Sporle

Andrew has provided ideas and funding to develop iNZight, and has advocated for the software in government and research groups. Through his company iNZight Analytics, Andrew supports iNZight's developers through personnel and development contracts.


Previous Team

Dineika Chandrananda (2010–2011)

One of the original developers of iNZight, responsible for the original ideas behind iNZight's interface and workflow.

Simon Potter (2011–2013)

While studying at the University of Auckland, Simon was the main developer of iNZight, responsible for the website, installers, and much of the package developement.

David Banks (2011–2013)

David worked on various parts of iNZight, including graphics, regression, time series, etc.

Junjie Zheng (2012–2014)

Junjie started working on iNZight as part of his MSc project, most of which is incorporated into the Multiple Response module. He also contributed to the GUI development of the Time Series and Model Fitting modules, and wrote the first iteration of iNZight Lite (originally iNZight Online).

Marco Kuper (2013–2014)

From Germany, Marco came to New Zealand to complete his Honours and Masters degrees here at the University of Auckland. Marco's work on iNZight involved redesigning the iNZight GUI from scratch, making it far more user- and developer-friendly, as well as some improvements to the Time Series package.

Christoph Knapp (2014–2015)

Another German visitor, Christoph completed his Masters here and was also responsible for designing and developing the current Lite app much like Marco did for iNZight, making it easier for both users now and developers in the future.

Chris Park (2014–2016)

While completing his postgraduate studies here, Chris worked on many of the Shiny apps, including iNZight Lite and Census at School.

Shengwei (Wilson) Hu (2014–2020)

Wilson worked on iNZight Lite while completing his PhD is statistics here at the University of Auckland. He was responsible for implementing new features to and fixing bugs in iNZight Lite, as well as maintaining the public shiny containers and providing technical support for users.

Daniel Barnett (2017–2021)

Daniel worked on iNZight as part of a summer project in 2017/18, and later extended the graphics to include the Financial Times Chart Library. He also rebuilt the maps module and added some epidemiological tests and modelling features.

Tong Chen (2019–2021)

Tong was responsible to maintaining and extending iNZigiht Lite while completing his PhD at the University of Auckland. He also added the Experimental Design module to Lite.

Jason Cairns (2021–2022)

Jason maintained iNZight Lite and refactored the build process to significantly speed up and minimise resource usage, while lead to massive improvements in the stability of the application.


Research Students

These students worked on iNZight as part of their Honours/Masters research projects.

  • Sophie Jones (MSc, 2020): visualisation of longitudinal data. Sophie developed a shiny app and an iNZight Addon linking to her 'longZight' package.

Summer Students

These students worked on iNZight for their Summer Scholarship.

Summer 2014/15
  • Eric Lim: modularised iNZight's Advanced Modules (Maps, Time Series, Multiple Response) so that they open in the same window, and did preliminary work on the Maps module.
Summer 2015/16
  • Jason Wen: developed the iNZightMaps package, used in the Maps module.
Summer 2016/17
  • Akshay Gupta: implemented an improved Import functionality, allowing users to read a range of different files, as well as support Meta information at the top of the file.
  • Dongning Zhang: expanded the range of Time Series formats that iNZight recognises, allowing for weekly (2012W01) and daily (2015D01) data, as well as days-per-week (W01D01) and hours-per-day (D01H02).
  • Yu Han Soh: started work on exporting iNZight's plots as interactive HTML/Javascript documents.
Summer 2017/18
  • Daniel Barnett: developed the regional maps module, allowing users to import shape files and plot regional (e.g., country, state, etc) data onto a map
Summer 2018/19
  • Lushi Cai: worked on a code-tidying algorithm which works with tidyverse-style code that collapses to fill the available width
  • Monica Merchant: began work on predictive model building module which allows users to use multiple methods and criteria to build a predictive model
  • Yiwen He: implemented datetime facilities to iNZight to allow users to create datetime variables and extract information (such as the year, hour) from a datetime; implemented data joining facilities
Summer 2021/22
  • Stephen Su: refactored the iNZightTS package to use packages from the tidyverts (tsibble, fable, and feasts).

If you've been left off this list, or want anything on it to change, just send me a message.