Yes, I’ve been lazy when it comes to writing here :-). I decided to go and write a short update on what’s been going on lately before going into my next post, which is going to take me a little bit longer. This post is mainly based on my progress report I’m supposed to be writing. In Waterloo, PhD students have to write a progress report every year telling the school what they did during the year.
The last two months have been quite interesting, I just updated the publications page accordingly. Together with Patrick K. Nicholson and Diego Seco we got a paper accepted into SPIRE 2011 about constructing Wavelet Trees in little space (almost in place). Also, together with Gonzalo Navarro, we are going to be giving a tutorial on space efficient data structures.
Another set of good news came from CIKM, where I’m a coauthor on two short papers accepted this year. One is with Antonio Farina, Miguel A. Martinez-Prieto and Gonzalo Navarro, where we present indexes for highly repetitive collections in two scenarios, when we want to query documents containing a pattern or positions in documents where the pattern is contained.
The second article that went in is a joint work with Susana Ladra, who recently (April) defended her PhD (It doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody that knows her that she did great :-)). This article mixes two know representations and uses the information of the url to split the graph and achieve a structure that supports navigation in both directions, offering the best tradeoff so far.
Finally, to close the set of good news, I was awarded with a U.S./Canada Google PhD. Fellowship in Search and Information Retrieval. This came as unexpected and highly appreciated news, thanks to this I’ll have my funding till the end of my PhD (hopefully). As part of the fellowship I was assigned a research mentor from Google for the next two years. My mentor is Stefan Büttcher, one of the authors of “Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines”. He also implemented a search engine called Wumpus. As you can imagine, I’ve a lot to learn from him and I’m looking forward to this experience :-).
And that’s it, now I go back to finishing my progress report due tomorrow.