University Professor Ian Munro has been named a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo, honouring his more than five decades of scholarly excellence, outstanding pedagogy and dedicated service to the university.
University Professor Munro joined Waterloo in 1971 at the age of 24, making him the youngest member of the Department of Applied Analysis and Computer Science as it was then known. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1975, Professor in 1981, and University Professor in 2006 — an honour established by Waterloo to recognize exceptional scholarly achievement and international prominence.
“Congratulations to Ian on his receiving this prestigious honour,” said University Professor Raouf Boutaba, Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “Throughout his career, Ian has made significant and lasting contributions to the field of computer science, particularly in space efficiency, data structures, and succinct data structures. He has advised 26 PhD students, more than 70 master’s students, and 19 postdoctoral researchers, many of whom now hold prestigious positions in industry and academia. Together, they have authored 250 research papers in top journals and conferences in their fields.”
University Professor Ian Munro held the Canada Research Chair in Algorithm Design for three consecutive seven-year terms, a prestigious national research chair first awarded to him in 2001. In 2003, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, in 2005 was named a Pioneer of Computing, and in 2006 was named a University Professor. In 2008, he became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for his contributions to algorithms and data structures. More recently, he received the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from CS-Can | Info-Can.
Research, Teaching and Service Achievements
University Professor Munro is internationally respected for his research on data structures and algorithms, most notably in highly space efficient data structures.
His pioneering research included the development of innovative algorithmic techniques such as the use of fast matrix multiplication for solving graph problems, extracting information from large unordered files by what are now called streaming algorithms, search trees that adapt to the frequency of accesses and various forms of hash tables. For the past thirty years his focus has been on minimizing space for structural information that leads to storage in fast memory and thus faster processing. Such representations use essentially the information theoretic minimum space and are known as succinct data.
His many research contributions have been celebrated by his peers. In 2013, a conference was held in his honour, with talks given by international and Canadian colleagues as well as current and former students. Known as Ianfest-66, the Conference on Space-Efficient Data Structures, Streams, and Algorithms was held at Waterloo in celebration of his 66th birthday, and its proceedings were published as a festschrift.
University Professor Munro’s teaching has evolved over the years. During his first term at Waterloo, he introduced an introductory graduate course on the efficiency of algorithms. This course, duly updated, has remained in the curriculum at the fourth year and introductory levels. For the past two decades, his teaching has focused on advanced graduate courses in data structures.
In addition to his research and teaching, University Professor Munro has held many administrative positions at Waterloo, including Director of the Institute for Computer Research, Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies, and Associate Chair of Graduate Studies. He also served for a decade as a board member of Waterloo’s Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing.
Beyond academia, he has served on the boards of several technology companies and has been actively involved in nurturing young computer scientists through the Canadian Computing Competition. He was on the Canadian Computing Competition and later the Canadian Computing Olympiad committees from 1995 to 2015, drafting the questions and lectures for participants in the second round of competitions in Waterloo. He was also involved with the International Olympiad in Informatics from 2000 to 2010, serving as leader of the Canadian team and as a member of its International Scientific Committee for three years.
For more information, please see “University Professor Ian Munro’s Golden Jubilee,” a feature published in 2021 celebrating his five-decade-long career at the University of Waterloo.