Short biography: Carola Wenk is a Professor of Computer Science at Tulane University and the Chair of the Department of Computer Science. She also holds an adjunct appointment in the Mathematics department. Her research area is in computational geometry, with a focus on shape matching algorithms. Her work encompasses theoretical aspects including algorithms and topological data analysis, as well as interdisciplinary applications ranging from geospatial to biomedical data analysis. She is an expert on the Fréchet distance for curves, and her work on map-matching GPS trajectories and road map construction and comparison has laid theoretical foundations for practitioners in the field. Dr. Wenk has won research, teaching, and service awards, including an NSF CAREER award. Her research has been supported by grants from several agencies such as NSF, NIH, DARPA, and IARPA. Her research interests span a wide range of application areas including geospatial data analysis, intelligent transportation systems, geographic information science, biomedical imaging, and computational biology.

Short biography: Ian Munro is University Professor and Canada Research Chair in Algorithm Design in the D.R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he has been a faculty member since completing his PhD 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.