Mini-course on Suffix Arrays and related data structures

Place: Aula Verde (Ca' Vignal 3, Piramide) 

Abstract: 
Suffix Arrays - either raw, or in compressed form - are the basic data structure underlying most current applications on massive sequence data, especially in bioinformatics. In this mini-course we will look at the basics of suffix arrays, including how they support searching, and how they can be combined with different range searching data structures to efficiently solve a variety of queries over sequences. A particular focus in the second half of the course will be the wavelet tree, an elegant range query data structure that is used in practical applications and also has nice asymptotic guarantees. 

This mini-course is associated to the course "Computational Analysis of Genome-Scale Sequences" (Zsuzsanna Lipták). However, everyone (students, PhD students, postdocs, lecturers) is welcome to attend. 

Short bio:
Simon J. Puglisi is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. He currently also holds a visiting professorship at the RIKEN AIP Center in Tokyo. Prior to his current appointment he spent two years as a Newton International Fellow at King's College London, and earlier still held an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Search Engine Lab at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. 

Simon J. Puglisi is a leading expert on efficient algorithms and data structures for storing, searching and mining strings and other discrete objects. He has co-authored 150 publications on topics related to strings, graphs, data compression, and bioinformatics and is regularly on the program committee of the main conferences in these areas. He was a keynote speaker at the 30th European Symposium on Algorithms and at the 17th Symposium on Experimental Algorithms. He currently chairs the Steering Committee of ALGO, the flagship meeting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS).