Professors Lap Chi Lau and Daniel Vogel have been named 2019 David R. Cheriton Faculty Fellows, positions they will hold until 2022. These prestigious three-year fellowships support the work of leading faculty members in the Cheriton School of Computer Science and are made possible through the David R. Cheriton Endowment for Excellence in Computer Science.
“We’re pleased to announce that Professors Lap Chi Lau and Daniel Vogel have been selected as the 2019 to 2022 Cheriton Faculty Fellows,” said Mark Giesbrecht, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “Lap Chi and Dan are have made exceptional contributions to their respective research areas, and have each received the Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award from CS-Can/Info-Can for their contributions to computer science. They are both accomplished teachers and supervisors as well. They are highly deserving of a Cheriton Faculty Fellowship, which will allow them to further their outstanding research programs.”
In total, the Cheriton Endowment for Excellence in Computer Science supports six Cheriton Faculty Fellowships, with two Fellowships awarded for three-year terms selected each year. The two Cheriton Faculty Fellowships awarded in 2018 were to Professor Edward Lank and University Professor M. Tamer Özsu. Professors Urs Hengartner and Bernard Wong hold fellowships that were awarded in 2017.
Lap Chi Lau
Lap Chi Lau is an Associate Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science and a member of the Algorithms and Complexity group. Before joining University of Waterloo, he was a faculty member at The Chinese University of Hong Kong for seven years. He has a PhD and MSc in Computer Science from University of Toronto, and a BSc in Computer Science from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Lap Chi’s research interests are in design and analysis of algorithms, including algorithmic graph theory, approximation algorithms and combinatorial optimization. He is interested in studying different approaches to solve graph problems and seeing new connections between them. He has designed good approximation algorithms and fast exact algorithms for graph problems, using ideas from linear algebra, probability and optimization. Recently, he is interested in using ideas from spectral graph theory and convex optimization to design and analyze algorithms for combinatorial problems.
Daniel Vogel
Daniel Vogel is an Associate Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science. He has published more than 60 papers in the area of Human Computer Interaction, focusing on fundamental characteristics of human input and novel forms of interaction for current and future computing form factors like touch, tangibles, large displays, mid-air gestures, and whole-body input.
In addition to earning PhD and MSc degrees from the University of Toronto, Daniel holds a BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and he leverages his combined art and science background in his research. For example, he was awarded a major grant to build a $1.8 million lab to explore the intersection of HCI and Fine Art in spatial augmented reality.
Daniel’s 2004 paper on interactive ambient displays is one of the ten most cited papers in the history of the ACM UIST conference, and he has received multiple honours including multiple best paper awards at ACM CHI; the Bill Buxton Dissertation Award (2010); a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship (2011–13), an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2017); the Faculty of Mathematics Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award (2018), and the CS-Can/Info-Can Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award (2018).
