Lossless Data Compression and Compact Data Structures

3 credits · Undergraduate

The speed at which our humanity generates and gathers data has outpaced even our ability to process and store it. Fortunately, much of this data is compressible — sometimes by several orders of magnitude. In the first part of this course we’ll cover the mathematical foundations of lossless compression and on efficient compression algorithms. Those results enable efficient transmission and storage of massive datasets, but often we want to work with those datasets without decompressing them, so the second part of the course will cover compressed data structures and computation over compressed data. The third part of the course will review the development of data structures for pangenomics as a case study in handling massive but highly compressible datasets. PREREQUISITES: CSCI 3110