Meet The Man Who Shrinks Big Data

As a kid growing up in St. Thomas in the U.S Virgin Islands, Jelani Nelson would teach himself how to code from the textbooks he picked up during his visits to the U.S mainland. Now, he devotes a lot of time to making it easier for children to study computer science. AddisCoder, the free summer program he founded in 2011 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has now taught computer science to over 500 high students. He now also creates cutting-edge algorithms designed to compress big data sets into smaller components — a type of system that has massive memory-saving benefits.

Learn more about Nelson’s life and work over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: Constanza Hevia for Quanta Magazine)