Frank Tompa is a
Canadian
Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...
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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 (a ...
.
He is best known for his contributions to the creation of an electronic version of the
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a c ...
, 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
The Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (french: Médaille du jubilé de diamant de la reine Elizabeth II) or The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal was a commemorative medal created in 2012 to mark the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's ...
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.
See also
* List of University of Waterloo people
The University of Waterloo, located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, is a comprehensive public university that was founded in 1957 by Drs. Gerry Hagey and Ira G. Needles. It has grown into an institution of more than 42,000 students, faculty, and ...
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)
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