Podcasts Technology Datacast Episode 53: Algorithms and Data Structures In Action with Marcello La Rocca

Episode 53: Algorithms and Data Structures In Action with Marcello La Rocca

Published: Jan. 25, 2021, 1 p.m.

Show Notes

  • (2:09) Marcello described his academic experience getting a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the Universita di Catania in the early 2000s, where his thesis is called Evolutionary Randomized Graph Embedder.
  • (6:14) Marcello commented on his career phase working as a web developer across various places in Europe.
  • (9:18) Marcello discussed his time working as a software engineer at INPS, a government-owned company that now handles most Italian citizens' pubic-related data.
  • (10:42) Marcello talked about his time as a data visualization engineer at SwiftIQ. He created a data visualization library that allows the inclusion of dynamic charts in HTML pages with just a few JavaScript lines.
  • (13:40) Marcello went over his projects while working as a full-stack software engineer for Twitter’s User Services Engineering team in Dublin.
  • (17:19) Marcello reflected on his time at Microsoft Zurich’s Social and Engagement team, contributing to machine learning infrastructure and tools.
  • (21:28) Marcello briefly touched on his one-year stint at Apple Zurich as a Senior Applied Research Engineer.
  • (23:49) Marcello talked about the challenges while writing “Algorithms and Data Structures in Action,” which introduces a diverse range of algorithms used in web apps, systems programming, and data manipulation.
  • (27:11) Marcello expanded upon part 1 of the book, including advanced data structures such as D-ary Heaps, Randomized Treaps, Bloom Filters, Disjoint Sets, Tries/Radix Trees, and Cache.
  • (34:51) Marcello brought up data structures to perform efficient multi-dimensional queries, including various nearest neighbor searches and clustering techniques, in part 2 of the book.
  • (39:21) Marcello briefly described the algorithms in part 3 of the book — graph embeddings, gradient descent, simulated annealing, and genetic algorithms.
  • (48:28) Marcello talked about his work on jsgraph — a lightweight library to model graphs, run graphs algorithms, and display them on screen.
  • (52:06) Marcello compared Python, Java, and JavaScript programming languages.
  • (54:13) Marcello discussed his current interest in quantum computing.
  • (56:18) Marcello shared his thoughts regarding Dublin, Zurich, and Rome's tech communities.
  • (57:37) Closing segment.

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