Meghan Allen BSc'01, MSc'06
Mentoring Award
Meghan Allen is recognized for her significant contribution to the Computer Science Tri-Mentoring program, having served as an industry and faculty mentor every year since the program’s inception. A big supporter of women in CS, Meghan regularly volunteered her time to recruit and retain female undergraduate and graduate students. She participated in the UBC Jumpstart orientation program as a senior faculty fellow on the academic steering committee. She also sits on the steering committee for Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects (UCOSP), a nationwide program that provides opportunities for students to learn about open source software by working in teams with faculty or industry mentors.
Renee Cheung BSc'06, MDM'14
Mentoring Award
Renee Cheung has been an active volunteer in the Department of Computer Science since her graduation, serving as an industry mentor in the Computer Science Tri-Mentoring program for more than 10 years. Renee has participated as a panelist at various industry events; given talks on user experience to computer science alumni; and guest-lectured for the software engineering course, CS 310. Outside the department, Renee has participated in the UBC Academic Leadership Department Program, acting as a resource and industry point of contact for a number of years.
David Dai
Mentoring Award
David Dai has been active with the Computer Science Tri-Mentoring program for the past 14 years, serving as a mentor to students and as an industry advisor to the program coordinators by lending his years of experience with new graduates to help improve the program. David continued to be engaged in the Tri-mentoring program even after he moved to Seattle, often traveling to Vancouver to meet with his mentees. While his recent relocation to California prevents him from being an active mentor, he generously offers his time and effort to give information interviews to students who are interested in working in the Bay Area.
Ghislaine Chan BSc’00
Service Award
Ghislaine Chan has been a tireless alumni volunteer for the past six years. During this time, she has been a mentor with the Computer Science Tri-Mentoring program, was an alumni representative at the 2017 UBC Computer Science graduation ceremony, and strengthened the GIRLsmarts4tech program by engaging parents to encourage their pre-teen and teenage girls to explore careers in tech. Ghislaine works to support young female computer scientists in the tech industry. In addition to being a frequent panelist at industry events, she co-founded the Vancouver chapter of Girls in Tech and was instrumental in creating the annual Broadridge Financial Solutions Award for Women in Computer Science.
David Greer BSc’80
Service Award
David Greer is recognized for his contributions to the Computer Science Tri-Mentoring program. Many computer science students, especially those who are interested in entrepreneurship, have benefited from his mentoring. David has a long history of supporting computer science students philanthropically by establishing the Greer Family Scholarship in 1990. Outside of his contributions to the Computer Science Department, David has provided valuable strategic insight to help shape the new UBC strategic plan.
Ian McLean BCS'17
Service Award
Ian McLean is recognized for his contributions to strengthening the Bachelor of Computer Science (BCS) program by attracting bright students from around the world, improving the curriculum, and building community among BCS students. Ian spearheaded the launch of the Bachelor of Computer Science Alumni Scholarship. He also co-created a new alumni-taught industry skills course, which he is piloting this summer with BCS students, with the hope of offering it to all computer science students in the future.
Sonja Norman BEd’74
Service Award
Sonja Norman is recognized for her contributions to the Department of Computer Science and to UBC as an industry mentor for 10 years in a row, and as an industry advisor to our former Dean of Science, Maria Klawe. Sonja additionally supported fundraising efforts for the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) – now Bachelor of Computer Science (BCS) – second degree program, and sat on numerous industry panels to prepare and advise students on their careers. She is a great supporter for Women in Computer Science and has been a role model to numerous female undergraduate and graduate computer science students.
Peter Smith PhD’98
Service Award
Dr. Peter Smith has been an active alumni volunteer for the past 10 years, greatly contributing to the growth of the UBC Computer Science alumni community. In 2009, Peter launched the Computer Science alumni/industry lecture series. He coordinates four lectures per year, recruiting top-notch alumni to deliver talks to the local tech sector. Peter has also served as an industry mentor for the past 14 years, giving guidance to graduate students in the department. Peter has also volunteered for the UBC Academic Leadership Development Program, given guest lectures for various computer science courses, as well as conducted technical interview practice sessions with undergraduate and graduate students.
Dr. Rachel Pottinger
Excellence in Teaching Award
Dr. Rachel Pottinger is passionate about improving access to STEM. She was the first recipient of the Anita Borg Institute’s Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award for junior faculty members who pursue high-quality research and have a significant positive impact on diversity. An associate professor at UBC, Rachel received her PhD in computer science from the University of Washington and a BS in computer science from Duke University. Her main research interest is data management – particularly semantic data integration, metadata management, managing data that is currently not well supported by databases, and making data easier to understand and explore.
Dr. Monica Lam BSc’80
Research Award
Dr. Lam has made pioneering contributions to compiler technology, computer architecture, operating systems, and high-performance computing, with further impact in areas that span databases, security, and HCI. She co-authored the definitive text on compiler technology and her research has been widely adopted in industry. She is an ACM Fellow, has won numerous best paper awards, and her 23 graduated PhD students are now faculty at universities that include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, and Columbia University. Monica Lam is a professor in the computer science department at Stanford University.
Dr. David Lowe BSc’78
Research Award
Dr. David Lowe has made significant contributions to computer vision. He was awarded the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award in 2015 and the ICCV Helmholtz Prize in 2011 and 2017. His IJCV and ICCV papers on scale-invariant features have been cited over 60,000 times and has been licensed for a multitude of commercial applications. David obtained his BSc at UBC and his PhD at Stanford University. He was an assistant professor at New York University; Assistant Professor, UBC; Scholar, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; Associate Professor, UBC; Professor, UBC; Fellow, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is the co-founder and Chairman of Cloudburst Research Inc., and now works as a Senior Research Scientist at Google in Seattle.
Murray Goldberg MSc'89
Entrepreneurship Award
Murray Goldberg is a noted Canadian educational technologist and a faculty member with UBC Computer Science. He is the founder of eLearning companies WebCT, Brainify, Silicon Chalk, AssociCom, and Marine Learning Systems. After graduating from the University of Victoria, he went on to earn an MSc from UBC. In 2004, he received an honorary PhD from the Southern Cross University. Murray serves as director for various companies, sits on the board of trustees of Harvey Mudd College, is a mentor at the GSV Labs tech incubator in Redwood City California, and is a frequent consultant and speaker on the future of eLearning, and is the chair of the British Columbia chapter of the Manning Innovation Awards. Murray won the Killiam Teaching Prize in his first year of teaching at UBC.
Point Grey Research
Entrepreneurship Award
Point Grey Research Inc. (PGR) started as a robot vision project in the Computer Science Laboratory for Computational Intelligence and subsequently spun out a UBC startup. The team of UBC students and staff that founded PGR in 1997 was initially funded by a grant in 1996 from the Technology Gap Assistance Program of PRECARN Inc. PGR was acquired in 2016 for US$259-million by FLIR Systems. Based in Richmond, BC, PGR, now known as FLIR Integrated Imaging Solutions (Machine Vision), is a global leader in the development of advanced visible imaging cameras and solutions that are used in industrial automation systems, medical diagnostic equipment, people counting systems, intelligent traffic systems, military and defense products, and advanced mapping systems.
Mik Kersten BSc'99, PhD'07
Entrepreneurship Award
Tasktop Technologies is a UBC Computer Science success story. A company that grew out of ICICS X-Wing 535, Tasktop now employs hundreds of people with offices across North America and Europe. Dr. Mik Kersten, Tasktop CEO and co-founder, is a true innovator and entrepreneur. It is through his vision, drive and leadership that Tasktop has grown to be the business it is today. Tasktop employs many UBC alumni and has been home to many UBC Co-op students over the years. Tasktop has won local awards from BC Tech, partnership awards from companies like HP and IBM, and partners with more than 30 companies in the software development ecosystem.
Dr. Charlotte Froese Fischer BA'52, MA'54
Founders Award
Dr. Charlotte Froese Fischer is recognized for her foundational and enduring contributions to UBC Computer Science. Before completing a PhD at Cambridge University, she completed two degrees at UBC – a BA in 1952 and an MA in 1954. Dr. Froese Fischer served on the UBC Mathematics faculty from 1957 until 1968, when she introduced numerical analysis courses into the curriculum. This was instrumental to the founding of the Department of Computer Science. Her many honours include being the first female to receive an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and an induction as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She returned to UBC Computer Science in 2016 as an affiliate professor and continues her research in computational atomic physics.
Dr. Richard Rosenberg
Founders Award
Dr. Richard Rosenberg was recruited into the newly created Department of Computer Science after completing his PhD at the University of Michigan, playing a pivotal role in developing the department and the Artificial Intelligence group. His later work focused on the implications of the internet, centered around privacy and ethics. He developed national and international privacy and ethics policies, particularly for electronic media, as well as national and international approaches to the regulation of free speech on the internet. As such, his work has been critical to promoting and protecting privacy rights. These issues often create ethical dilemmas for computer scientists so he developed methodologies for teaching ethics and professional standards to computer science students and approaches to dealing with these dilemmas as they arise in the workplace, educational institutions, and at home. He has also been honoured with the BC Civil Liberties Association Lifetime Achievement Award and the IBM Pioneers of Canadian Computing Award.
UBC Computer Science 50th Anniversary
Celebrate 50 Years of Excellence in Research, Learning, and Innovation
2018-2019