Recognition of work to improve the efficiency of search systems and databases

The Master student thesis work "Trie-compressed Intersectable Sets" by Juan Pablo Castillo, UC PhD student, IMFD and former UTFSM Master student , is a finalist in the Latin American Master Thesis Competition of the CLEI 2024 conference, which seeks to reward and disseminate the work of Latin American students who have recently completed their master's theses in computer science or informatics.

The topic of the thesis "is the classical set intersection problem, which is a fundamental part of search systems and databases, among other applications," explains the IMFD student. These are structures that underlie many of the currently used search engines, such as google or other similar systems.

"The thesis was based on creating an algorithm on a compressed data structure that allows us to intersect sets efficiently. The structure is compressed because we want it to take up as little space as possible. Considering the magnitudes of data we handle today, the less space it takes up, the better it is for any system," explains the student currently admitted to the DCC UC doctoral program.

The results of the tests carried out by the researchers show that the algorithm created is very competitive with the state of the art. Diego Arroyuelo, an academic from the UC Department of Computer Science and Juan Pablo Castillo's guiding professor, emphasizes that this recognition comes to a work that "revitalizes in some way a very important topic within algorithms, such as the intersection of data sets, for which there have been no significant theoretical results for at least 20 years. We were able to propose a solution that allows us to analyze these types of algorithms, and which in turn allows us to put these solutions into practice".

Juan Pablo Castillo will travel to present his work at the parallel event of the 50th Latin American Conference on Informatics (CLEI), an annual activity organized by the Latin American Center for Informatics Studies, which has been held since 1974, itinerantly throughout Latin American countries. This year it will be held from August 12 to 16, 2024, at the Universidad Nacional del Sur, in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, in partnership with the Sociedad Argentina de Informática (SADIO).

CLEI is the most important Latin American space for the exchange of ideas, experiences and research results among researchers, professionals, teachers and students of Computer Science and Informatics, as well as their technological applications. Its objective is the exchange of ideas, experiences and research results in areas of interest to the community, through conferences, workshops, tutorials and panels.