Engineering compressed data structures

Monday, Apr 13, 2026 11AM ET

Peter Sanders, KIT

Abstract

I will present several recent results on compressed data structures. All have in common that algorithm engineering helps theory meet practice. In particular, we will see practical solutions whose space consumption is very close to theoretical lower bounds. Concretely, I will cover bit vectors with support for rank and select, perfect hashing, static function retrieval, and replacements for Bloom filters.

Bio

Peter Sanders received his PhD in computer science from Universität Karlsruhe in 1996. After a short postdoc period at Chalmers University in Gothenburgh, Sweden, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken. He returned to Karlsruhe as a full professor in 2004. He leads the Algorithm Engineering Group at the Informatics Department of KIT in the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science. Peter Sanders won a number of prices among them the DFG Leibniz Award 2012 and a 2020 ERC advanced grant for the project "Engineering Scalable Algorithms for the Basic Toolbox -- ScAlBox". He has more than 300 publications, mostly on algorithms for large data sets. This includes parallel algorithms (sorting, SAT solving, data structures, multi-core algorithm libraries, load balancing, communication scheduling, e.g., using network coding,...), memory hierarchies (caches, disks, storage servers,...), graph algorithms (route planning, graph partitioning...), randomized algorithms, compressed data structures, full text indices, etc.