Sunday, November 3, 2013

Is your treasure secure? Data structures and why they can't be taken for granted.

What happens when you need to call someone from your home phone or cell phone? You normally navigate your device's interface to a particular section of sorted data commonly called the "Address Book" (or some similar variation). Any contact information you have stored locally or via a network of some kind (quite possibly a cloud network), is readily accessible. But have you thought about the operation of such a feature?



Data needs to be secure. Most often, security is thought of as being protection of information. However, there is another definition that information technology professionals swear by and the common user-base tends to ignore. A given user knows their information has proper security when it is safe to use in different ways. Data structures can hold databases, some much like the Address Book mentioned earlier. Proper development of tools used for accessing and modifying can be tricky. For instance, data needs to be accessible as quickly as possible - you want to call a specific contact via the address book at least slightly faster than it would take to remember an arbitrary number and dial it. Many algorithms have been invented, analyzed, and updated in order to take advantage of modern technologies.

As such, data structures and associated algorithms are essential to supporting the kinds of services that are vital to modern society. There are a plethora of different uses for these tools.  




* Structuring Depth-First Search Algorithms in Haskell (1995)
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5 comments:

  1. Ryan Lee FALL2013_CS100WNovember 7, 2013 at 5:31 PM

    Hey Joshua! I like your introduction, where you related a common situation that almost everyone has gone through, in this case, finding someone's contact information in the address book, and then follow it by how it works and data is related to this. It is important to have security to protect your data for your address book, since you wouldn't want strangers to somehow obtain the number. You gave a great example of data structures in real life situations! Good job!

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  2. vimal Kumar November 7, 2013 at 9:15 PM

    Hello, I like the title of your blog, Data structure as a treasure, it is important since it dictate the type of operation we can perform on the data and how efficiently they can be carried out. You have cited good example of phone book. Great work.

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  3. UnknownNovember 9, 2013 at 7:05 PM

    Hi Joshua! I liked how to started talking about the address book. It is an excellent example of data structures importance. There are many data structures available to store data, but the main thing is accessing the data information. The data structure, which allows access to data quickly, is the best choice depending upon any particular program. To make your topic more interesting, I think you should have added little more information about data structures. Overall, I enjoyed reading this blog post on data structures.

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  4. UnknownNovember 10, 2013 at 11:43 PM

    Hey Joshua, first time I'm checking out your blog and I like what I see! Very informative posts all around, and this one is no different. Good illustrations accompanying your post. I particularly like your analogy to the phone book, it helps show the importance of security as it relates to various data structures. Good post, I wish it was longer though!

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  5. UnknownNovember 17, 2013 at 11:18 PM

    Hi Joshua! I like that you talked about data structure in a very different aspect. And the address book is easily understanding. And the source you cited is very useful. It’s a great short post!

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