Teaching Seminar: Elijah Rivera, An Introduction to Hashmaps
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Speaker
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Freedom from the Numbers, by the Numbers, for the Numbers: An Introduction to Hashmaps
Abstract0
(Adapted lecture from the course “Program Design with Data Structures and Algorithms" at Brown University. This talk assumes familiarity with list-like and array-like data structures.)
Arrays offer efficient storage and lookup operations for ordered or numerically-labeled data, but real-world data often doesn't lend itself to numeric organization. Does this mean we miss out on the benefits of arrays? We don't have to! In this lecture, we’ll design a powerful new data structure—the hashmap—that allows us to use non-numeric keys with the same ease as numeric indices. We’ll dive into the mechanics of transforming keys into array indices, and address the engineering challenges and trade-offs involved. By the end, we’ll achieve a data structure that maintains constant-time access to data, no matter what kinds of labels our information carries.
Bio
Elijah Rivera is a PhD candidate in CS at Brown University, advised by Prof. Shriram Krishnamurthi and Prof. Kathi Fisler. His expertise and his heart are both in computing education, but his mind is easily distracted by interesting problems from many other fields of CS. Prior to his time at Brown, he received both his S.B. and M.Eng. from MIT, where he worked on several research projects in the fields of programming languages, program synthesis, and formal verification.
Host