Frank Tompa

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Frank Tompa
Portrait of Distinguished Professor Emeritus Frank Tompa taken in the Davis Centre at the University of Waterloo
NationalityCanadian
Alma materBrown University ScB and ScM (1970), University of Toronto Ph.D. (1974)[2]
Known forData Structures, Databases
SpouseHelen Tompa
AwardsHonorary Degree, Dalhousie University, 2013; Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, 2012; Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery, 2010
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Waterloo, University of Toronto, Bellcore, Stanford University, Microsoft Research, University of British Columbia
Doctoral advisorCalvin Gotlieb[1]
Websitecs.uwaterloo.ca/~fwtompa

Frank Tompa is a Canadian-American computer scientist.

He is best known for his contributions to the creation of an electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary,[3] work that was further commercialized in the founding of Open Text Corporation.[4]

Education and professional life

Tompa received his doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1974; since then, he has been a faculty member in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.[5] He served as Chair of the Computer Science Department for two terms, one in the 1990s and one in the 2000s.

In 2012 he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal created "to honour Her Majesty for her service to this country... [and] to honour significant contributions and achievements by Canadians"; more specifically "in light of ... significant contributions to text data and design systems for maintaining large reference texts."[6]

In 2010 he was named an ACM Fellow for his contributions to "text-dominated and semi-structured data management." In 2005, a street in the University of Waterloo's Research and Technology Park was named Frank Tompa Drive to recognize his contributions to both the City of Waterloo and the University of Waterloo.[2][7]

See also

References

  1. ^ Frank William Tompa at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ a b Atzenbeck, Claus (July 2011). "Interview with Frank Tompa". ACM SIGWEB Newsletter. 2011 (Summer). ACM. Article no. 3. doi:10.1145/1980002.
  3. ^ Murphy, Cullen (February 1, 1989), "Caught in the Web of bytes: the electronic Oxford English Dictionary", The Atlantic, archived from the original on June 10, 2014.
  4. ^ Waddell, Nick (29 April 2011). "Cantech Letter interviews John Shackleton of OpenText". Cantech Letter.
  5. ^ "Frank Tompa: Managing Virtual Records in Relational Databases". Dalhousie University Events. Archived from the original on 1 February 2014.
  6. ^ "Dean's Message". University of Waterloo Mathematics. December 2012. Archived from the original on 3 March 2013.
  7. ^ "Frank Tompa Drive". Google Maps.


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