This project would make an excellent honors thesis or master's project and might lead to publication. This project would make an excellent honors thesis and might lead to publication. There are several possible avenues, ranging from deep development of one or two ideas to pulling all the ideas together into a coherent design. This project should lead to publication. The project is to find a good way to automate the process, first for trees, then for general linked data structures.
Fingerprints have applications in security as well as filesystem replication.
The engineering tradeoffs involved in the implementation of fingerprints are not well understood. The project is to study alternatives experimentally in order to engineer a very fast fingerprinter. The idioms used to express the code may vary depending on the language or the application. Each of these approaches has advantages in different situations. The project is to use the Standard ML modules system to devise a suitable way of choosing an idiom for a particular application.