Weka
The University of Waikato in New Zealand released a free collection of machine learning algorithms with a graphical interface.
Why it matters
Classical methods could be applied without programming them, and machine learning reached beyond people who write code.
Weka gathered decision trees, naive Bayes, support vectors and clustering into one window that takes a table. That made it the standard tool for teaching and for applied work in biology, medicine and the social sciences. The name is a local flightless bird. The project is also telling in another way: an influential tool came from far outside the large centres.