Four faculty members at Cheriton School of Computer Science promoted to full professor

The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science is pleased to announce that Professors Gladimir Baranoski, Edward Lank, David Toman and Justin Wan have been promoted to full professor effective July 1, 2018.

“Congratulations to Gladimir, Ed, David and Justin,” said Dan Brown, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “These much-deserved promotions highlight the excellent contributions that these colleagues have made in teaching and research, and we all celebrate this important milestone with them.”

Professor Gladimir Baranoski

Professor Gladimir Baranoski’s research interests include the predictive simulation of light interactions with organic and inorganic materials and the biophysically based rendering of natural phenomena.

The results of his research have been made available to the scientific community through the publication of articles in journals and conference proceedings in computer graphics, biomedical optics, remote sensing and related fields.

Professor Baranoski has a PhD from the University of Calgary.

Professor Edward Lank

Professor Edward Lank was the co-founder of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, which he continues to co-direct. His primary research interests are in intelligent user interfaces, gestural interaction and movement modelling. His current projects include work in mechanisms for leveraging reject rates to increase the perceived reliability of recognition-based user interfaces. He has explored the design of free-space gesture input languages (e.g., motion gestures) and mechanisms for treating motion gestures and he and his students have explored techniques for predicting target locations in goal-directed movements (e.g., pointing) and speed profiles in constrained movements in interfaces.

Alongside his primary research areas, Professor Lank is broadly interested in all aspects of human–computer interaction. Among many other topics, he has recently explored persuasive technologies, sustainability, computer-supported cooperative work, usable privacy and security, sketch and diagram recognition, and human-in-the-loop information retrieval.

Professor Lank is a past recipient of a National Science Foundation Career Award, NSF’s most prestigious award for pre-tenure faculty. Alongside research, he has been active in administration, serving as Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2011–13 and Associate Director of the School of Computer Science at Waterloo from 2013–15.

Professor Lank has a PhD in computer science from Queen’s University and an Honours Bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Prince Edward Island. He joined the faculty at Waterloo in 2006. Before that, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at San Francisco State University.

Professor David Toman

Professor David Toman is a faculty member of the Cheriton School of Computer Science’s Data Systems Group. His research focuses on logic-based foundations of knowledge representation with applications to information systems and databases. He has designed several decidable knowledge representation languages based on description logics and developed efficient algorithms for ontology-based query answering. He is the recipient (with co-authors) of Ray Reiter Prizes in 2010 and 2016.

Professor Toman received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Masaryk University in the Czech Republic in 1992 and his PhD in computer science from Kansas State University in 1996. After graduation, he was a NATO/NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and then joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in 1998. He was also a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Bolzano and TU Dresden as a part of the EU’s Erasmus Mundus Computational Logic Programme.

Professor Justin Wan

Professor Justin Wan has been a faculty member of the Cheriton School of Computer Science’s Scientific Computation Group since 2001.

Professor Wan was a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Scientific Computing. From 2010–15, he was the Director for the Centre of Computational Mathematics for Industry and Commerce. From 2015–18, he was appointed as the Associate Director for the Cheriton School of Computer Science. He has also been active in service for his research community. Since 2015, Professor Wan has been the Secretary, an elected Exec Officer, of the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society. He has organized local workshops as well as international conferences. He has also served as a journal editor and as a member of several program committees. Recently, he has been invited to serve on the editorial board of the new CAIMS journal, Mathematics in Science and Industry.

Professor Wan’s research area is scientific computing with special interests in developing efficient numerical techniques for solving partial differential equations arising from modelling. The applications he is interested in are computational finance, image processing, and physically and biologically based simulation for computer graphics and medicine. Over past years, he has been developing fast numerical algorithms, in particular, multigrid preconditioning methods, to solve different types of partial differential equations arising from applications. The research results address the fundamental issues of numerical methods and models, and advance the computational techniques in different areas of scientific computing.

Professor Wan received his PhD in applied mathematics from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1998. After graduation, he worked in the Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics Program at Stanford University as a Forsythe Fellow from 1998–2000 before he joined the University of Waterloo.