Interview with Frank Tompa

Since completing his ScB and ScM at Brown University in 1970 and his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1974, Frank Tompa has been on the faculty in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He has also worked for periods of several months at the Oxford University Press, Bellcore, Microsoft Research, the University of Toronto, and Stanford University. His teaching and research interests are in the fields of data structures and databases, particularly the design of text management systems suitable for maintaining large reference texts and large, heterogeneous text collections. He has co-authored papers in the areas of database dependency theory, storage structure selection, query processing, materialized view maintenance, text matching, XML processing, structured text conversion, database integration, data retention and security, and text classification. In 2005, the University of Waterloo and the City of Waterloo announced the naming of the road Frank Tompa Drive in recognition of Professor Tompa being one of those who "epitomize the energy and enterprise that characterize the University of Waterloo." In 2010, he was named a Fellow of the ACM for contributions to text-dominated and semi-structured data management.