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Marina Barsky

Teaching Assistant Professor


Contact Information

Office: 5403 Sennott Square

Phone: under construction

E-mail: mbarsky@pitt.edu

Marina Barsky is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh. Marina has her Master's and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Victoria, Canada, and the MSc in Biology from Moscow State University, Russia. Marina has taught numerous undergraduate and graduate courses, including Database System Implementation and Machine Learning. Previously, Marina worked as a Researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and taught at the University of Toronto. She developed and taught the entire CS curriculum for a small liberal arts college.

Teaching

CS 0445. Algorithms and Data Structures - 1. Fall 2023: website. Fall 2025: recitations and assignments.

Data structures capture common ways in which we store and manipulate data, and they are very important for building sophisticated computer programs. In this course we use Java programming language for examples and assignments.

CS 1503. Mathematical foundations of Machine Learning. Fall 2025: syllabus.

Deep learning has transformed the field of Machine Learning over the last decades. Though inspired by attempts to mimic the way the brain learns, it is heavily grounded in basic principles of probability and statistics. This introductory course presents these basic principles and discusses them in context of several 'classical' ML tasks.

Research

Marina's main research focus is in algorithms on strings and their applications to big data and biological sequence analysis. She invented new scalable algorithms for building suffix trees, suffix arrays, and for all-against-all approximate substring matching. She published research papers in top Computer Science venues and authored the book "Full-text (substring) indexes in external memory".