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Lecture by Hristo Venev

A special guest and guru of CodeIT's final for season 2021/2022 was Hristo Venev from Bulgaria - a world-renowned golden talent in competitive programming. He is a recipient of many awards, the most notable - 4 gold and 1 silver medals from the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). This achievement puts him at 2nd place in IOI's all-time Hall of Fame. From 2016 to 2020 Mr. Venev studied Computer Science at Oxford University and graduated with a Master's degree. During his first-year studies there he was part of a team that qualified for the ACM ICPC World finals in 2017. Venev is currently back in Sofia, Bulgaria where he is working as a programmer for an international company.

In his presentation at the final Mr. Venev discussed the topic of data structures which are optimized for reading and storing data on hard disk drives (HDD) or flash memory storage (SSD). Examples of such data structures are B-trees (B+, B* and B-ε). Some of the main advantages of these types of trees are their short height, wide trunk and the fact that each node contains a lot more information that a regular binary tree. This makes them a good fit for implementations of databases and file systems where fast access is required.

Other structures that Hristo Venev reviewed are data structures for fast log writes such as log-structured merge (LSM) trees and probabilistic structures for quick data existence checks such as Bloom and Cuckoo filters.

At the end of the lecture the coach of the Serbian team, Duško Obradović, shared some non-algorithmic emotions from a camp school in nature, which he organizes annually. In this exciting adventure he teaches his students how to survive in nature and how to be a good and collaborative team.

You can watch the full lecture by Hristo Venev here:


The video from the Serbian camp school is available here: