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NII Theory Seminar "Text Indexing in Compressed Space" by Tomasz Kociumaka (MPI-INF/Saarland U, Saarbruecken, Germany)

We are pleased to inform you about the upcoming seminar by Tomasz Kociumaka (MPI-INF/Saarland U, Saarbruecken, Germany) titled:"Text Indexing in Compressed Space" Everyone interested is cordially invited to attend!

Title:

Text Indexing in Compressed Space

Abstract:

Massive sequential datasets in genomics and other areas have intensified the challenge of designing efficient text indexes: data structures that answer queries about a dataset modeled as a very long string (the text). A fundamental example is pattern matching, which asks whether a short string given at query time (the pattern) occurs in the text. Classic structures such as suffix arrays, and their compact variants like the FM-index, support such queries but do not scale well for highly repetitive data, including population-scale genome collections and versioned document repositories. These settings require indexes whose size is comparable to that of standard compression methods.

In this talk, I will introduce the area of compressed text indexing, discuss selected state-of-the-art results, and highlight several future directions. On a more technical level, I will present a simple compressed text index for pattern matching that combines two tools I contributed to the area: substring complexity and synchronizing sets.

Bio:

Tomasz Kociumaka (MPI-INF/Saarland U, Saarbruecken, Germany)

Since 2025, Tomasz is a Group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany. Before that, he held positions at INSAIT, Sofia, Bulgaria; University of California, Berkeley and Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
He received the EATCS Presburger Award 2025 for his breakthrough contributions on text indexing in compressed strings and other major problems in the field.