CSE Lecturer Candidate Seminar: Hector Garcia

Hash Tables: Theory and Applications

In this lecture, I will talk about hashing concepts and their relevance to the implementation of hash tables. I'll describe basic collision resolution strategies and provide some performance comparisons between such strategies. Lastly, I'll discuss some practical implementations of hash tables and how these hashing concepts have been generalized into noSQL technologies to meet scalability requirements with the advent of Big Data.
Héctor is a lead engineer for TD Ameritrade's thinkorswim — a software platform that offers industry-leading financial trading tools. He manages thinkorswim's domain-specific language called thinkScript, which facilitates real-time market data streaming and powerful statistical analysis for day traders. Prior to joining TD Ameritrade, Héctor worked at Amazon Marketplace where he designed an AWS platform to automate parsing of raw customer data in real-time and process such data using distributed machine learning algorithms.

Hector's research at University of Michigan involves the modeling and distributed simulation of advanced technologies such as quantum computing systems. Such devices are represented by so-called quantum circuits, which behave differently than conventional digital circuits, acting in accordance with quantum physics instead of classical physics.