The computer science department will host a lecture by Yihan Sun, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, 10-10:50 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 6, in Room 209 Computer Science Building.

With the evolution of hardware and growth in the volume of data, parallelism has become imperative and the key to improving performance. As such, it is of great interest to have simple and efficient parallel algorithms and data structures for programmers to easily organize and process data. Sun’s research designs such simple and efficient parallel algorithms and data structures, with provable guarantees in theory, good performance in practice, as well as simplicity in programming. In particular, this talk will introduce my work on parallel tree structures, that are highly-parallelized, safe for concurrency, theoretically work-efficient, supporting a wide range of functions and augmentations and multi-versioned. The tree structure is also implemented in a C++ library called PAM, and applied to various areas such as computational geometry and databases.

Sun is advised by Dr. Guy Blelloch. She earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Tsinghua University, working on data mining and social network analysis. Her research interests broadly lie in the theory and practice of parallel algorithms and data structures, as well as their implementation and applications.