Luca Versari

Posts

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

About me

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I am Luca Versari, a mathematician who was tempted by the dark side and switched to Computer Science.

I aim to make the world a better place for everyone, but I don’t have a way to solve everything yet - so far I only attempted to make usage of the Internet more pleasant :)

I really like reading books and manga, watching movies and anime, and playing video games. My favourite genres are science fiction and fantasy (especially if time travel is involved), and for video games in particular I especially like JRPGs.

I also enjoy mathematics, computer science and related topics - especially things like imagining (or drawing) mathematical objects, technical drawing, random facts about natural numbers, diophantine equations, programming and compression.

Other miscellaneous things that I enjoy are cooking, listening to music (classical and epic music in particular) and just about anything that makes me reason and think.

Here are some of my all-time favourites things.

Video games

Chrono Trigger

Chrono Trigger is, in my humble opinion, the best game of all time. It’s a Japanese RPG, with an amazing story involving time travel and some of the best music I’ve ever listened to.

I cannot really find the words to describe how beautiful this game is. Your only option is to try it out!

Beautiful things

Fractals

As you can see from the homepage, I like looking at and generating fractals, either with existing software like Mandelbulber2 or with my own code.

Music

Two Steps From Hell

One of my favourite bands. You can find their music here.

Many of their songs are incredibly energizing! Some that I particularly like:

Curriculum Vitae

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Current position

Software Engineer at Google Research, Zürich, since 2019.

Working (mostly) on JPEG XL, a new image compression format.

Random projects

I wrote very fast PNG and JXL encoders. Slides about those encoders, with links to code on GitHub, can be found here.

Education

PhD in Computer Science, University of Pisa, Pisa (2017-2021) Compression Techniques for Large Graphs: Theory and Practice (pdf, slides).

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (2015-2017)
A new algorithmic framework for enumerating commutable set properties (pdf, slides).

Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (2012-2015)
Ricerca veloce di pattern comuni a due grafi (pdf, slides).

Awards

10th place at the AliBaBa Global Scheduling Competition.
Winner of the First Reply Code Challenge.
81st place at the Google Distributed Code Jam Round 2
14th place at the Google Hash Code team competition.
Silver medal at the International Olympiads in Informatics.
Honourable mention at the Romanian Master in Mathematics.
Gold medal at the national Olympiads in Physics.
Gold medal at the national Olympiads in Mathematics.
First place at the national-level competition “Gara di Modellizzazione Matematica”.
Bronze medal at the Balkan Mathematical Olympiad.

Publications

See my Google Scholar page.