Ian Munro

Ian Munro is University Professor and Canada Research Chair in Algorithm Design in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he has been a faculty member since completing his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1971. His research has concentrated on the efficiency of algorithms and data structures. He has authored about 150 research papers and supervised more than a dozen Ph.D.'s on the subject. Dr. Munro has held visiting positions at a number of major universities and research labs, including AT&T Bell Labs, Princeton University and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. His consulting activities have included work with government and several major computer companies. He has served on the editorial boards of CACM, Inf & Comp, and B.I.T., and the program committees of most of the major conferences in his area. He is a former Director of Waterloo's Institute for Computer Research. He is presently a member of the board of the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2003 and made University Professor in 2006.

Ian Munro works in the general area of algorithms and data structures, straddling the line between theory and applications. Most of his work has been on data structures, with a particular interest in space efficient structures. The general goal is to develop data structures that are provably optimal in time and provably minimal in space requirements. A major theme in his recent work has been succinct data structures, that is the representation of structural information in (virtually) the information theoretic minimum space while permitting the necessary operations to be performed very quickly.