Datacast
Episode 53: Algorithms and Data Structures In Action with Marcello La Rocca
Episode Summary
Marcello La Rocca is a research scientist and a full-stack engineer. He works as a senior backend engineer at Tundra.com, developing large-scale web applications and machine learning infrastructure. He has gained invaluable experience at Twitter, Microsoft, and Apple - working on applied research in academia and industry. His work and interests focus on graphs, optimization algorithms, genetic algorithms, machine learning, and quantum computing.
Episode Notes
Show Notes
- (2:09) Marcello described his academic experience getting a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the Universita di Catania in the early 2000s, where his thesis is called Evolutionary Randomized Graph Embedder.
- (6:14) Marcello commented on his career phase working as a web developer across various places in Europe.
- (9:18) Marcello discussed his time working as a software engineer at INPS, a government-owned company that now handles most Italian citizens' pubic-related data.
- (10:42) Marcello talked about his time as a data visualization engineer at SwiftIQ. He created a data visualization library that allows the inclusion of dynamic charts in HTML pages with just a few JavaScript lines.
- (13:40) Marcello went over his projects while working as a full-stack software engineer for Twitter’s User Services Engineering team in Dublin.
- (17:19) Marcello reflected on his time at Microsoft Zurich’s Social and Engagement team, contributing to machine learning infrastructure and tools.
- (21:28) Marcello briefly touched on his one-year stint at Apple Zurich as a Senior Applied Research Engineer.
- (23:49) Marcello talked about the challenges while writing “Algorithms and Data Structures in Action,” which introduces a diverse range of algorithms used in web apps, systems programming, and data manipulation.
- (27:11) Marcello expanded upon part 1 of the book, including advanced data structures such as D-ary Heaps, Randomized Treaps, Bloom Filters, Disjoint Sets, Tries/Radix Trees, and Cache.
- (34:51) Marcello brought up data structures to perform efficient multi-dimensional queries, including various nearest neighbor searches and clustering techniques, in part 2 of the book.
- (39:21) Marcello briefly described the algorithms in part 3 of the book — graph embeddings, gradient descent, simulated annealing, and genetic algorithms.
- (48:28) Marcello talked about his work on jsgraph — a lightweight library to model graphs, run graphs algorithms, and display them on screen.
- (52:06) Marcello compared Python, Java, and JavaScript programming languages.
- (54:13) Marcello discussed his current interest in quantum computing.
- (56:18) Marcello shared his thoughts regarding Dublin, Zurich, and Rome's tech communities.
- (57:37) Closing segment.
His Contact Info
His Recommended Resources
This is the 40% discount code that is good for all Manning’s products in all formats: poddcast19.
These are 5 free eBook codes, each good for one copy of “Algorithms and Data Structures in Action”:
- adsdcr-5E76
- adsdcr-EE51
- adsdcr-DD47
- adsdcr-B1BF
- adsdcr-A61F