The ever growing need to efficiently store, retrieve and analyze massive datasets, originated by very different sources, is currently made more complex by the different requirements posed by users and applications. Such a new level of complexity cannot be handled properly by current data structures for big data problems.
To successfully meet these challenges, we launched a project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education (PRIN no. 2017WR7SHH), that will lay down the theoretical and algorithmic-engineering foundations of a new generation of Multicriteria Data Structures and Algorithms. The multicriteria feature refers to the fact that we wish to seamlessly integrate, via a principled optimization approach, modern compressed data structures with new, revolutionary, data structures learned from the input data by using proper machine-learning tools. The goal of the optimization is to select, among a family of properly designed data structures, the one that “best fits” the multiple constraints imposed by its context of use, thus eventually dominating the multitude of trade-offs currently offered by known solutions, especially in the realm of Big Data applications.
A multicriteria data structure, for a given problem $P$, is defined by a pair $\langle \mathcal F, \mathcal A \rangle_P$ where $\mathcal F$ is a family of data structures, each one solving $P$ with a proper trade-off in the use of some resources (e.g. time, space, energy), and $\mathcal A$ is an optimisation algorithm that selects in $\mathcal F$ the data structure that best fits an instance of $P$.
For more details on the project, have a look at its full description here.
A data structure enabling fast searches in arrays of billions of items using orders of magnitude less space than traditional indexes.
