Frank Tompa is a Canadian-

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

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

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. 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... ndto 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." 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.

References

Living people Scientific computing researchers Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Brown University alumni University of Toronto alumni University of Waterloo faculty Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-academic-bio-stub

Education and professional life

See also

References