In October 2019, Jiehua Chen has joined the Algorithms and Complexity Group on a tenure track position. 

Jiehua’s research interests are the parameterized complexity of, and the design and analysis for, combinatorial problems arising in contexts such as optimization related to graphs and hypergraphs, computational social choice, and preference-based stable matchings.

Jiehua is the principal investigator of a Vienna Research Group in ICT project, which is funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), which is comparable both in competitiveness as well as funding volume with an ERC starting grant. The project’s

At the highly competitive  ”Information and Communication Technology” Project Call of the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), three projects from members of the Algorithms and Complexity group where successful.

Engineering Linear Ordering Algorithms for Optimizing Data Visualizations. PI: Martin Nöllenburg 
Learning to Solve Quantified Boolean Formulas. PI: Friedrich Slivovsky
Revealing and Utilizing the Hidden Structure for Solving Hard Problems in AI. PI Stefan Szeider

All three projects together amount to a total funding sum of over EUR 1.3 Mio.

Out of 96 submitted short proposals, 26 have been invited to submit a full proposal, and 9 of

Two submissions of graph layouts from the Algorithms and Complexity Group were successful in the 26th Graph Drawing Contest, which was held in conjunction with the 27th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD) in Průhonice near Prague in September 2019.

PhD students Guangping Li, Soeren Nickel and their advisor Martin Nöllenburg from the Algorithms and Complexity Group together with their colleagues Hsiang-Yun Wu and Ivan Viola from the Visualization Group of TU Wien won the First Prize in the category “Creative Topics: Meal Ingredients”. In this category the

Tomáš Peitl successfully defended his PhD thesis “Advanced Dependency Analysis for QBF” on October 14, 2019. Congratulations!

Tomáš was was supervised by Stefan Szeider and co-supervised by Friedrich Slivovsky.

In November, he will start with his FWF Erwin Schrödinger scholarship a postdoc position at the Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena.

Our solver htdSMT submitted by André Schidler and Stefan Szeider achieved the first place in the PACE’19 competition for the Track Hypertree Width/Exact.

PACE’19 is the 4th edition of the Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge,  which was conceived in Fall 2015 to deepen the relationship between parameterized algorithms and practice. Implemented algorithms are submitted and ranked by their performance on a large set of benchmark problem instances.

PACE’19 had three tracks: Vertex Cover, Hypertree Width/Exact, and Hypertree Width/Heuristic. Our algorithm HtdSMT came first in the Hypertree Width/Exact track.

The award ceremony took

Neha Lodha successfully defended her PhD thesis “SAT Approach to Decomposition” on June 18,, 2019. Congratulations!

Neha was was supervised by Stefan Szeider.

Neha was one of the first students who joined the Doctoral Program Logical Methods in Computer Science (LogiCS) where she was a student representative.

The Algorithms and Complexity Group has currently three female PhD students:

Thekla Hamm works in the FWF funded research project “New Frontiers for Parameterized Complexity (FWF P31336)” under the advise of  Dr. Robert Ganian.
Guangping Li works in the FWF funded research project “Human-centered Algorithm Engineering: Graph and Map Visualization (FWF P31119)” under the advise of Prof. Martin Nöllenburg.
Neha Lodha works in the FWF funded Doctoral College “Logical Methods in Computer Science (FWF W1255)” under the advise of Prof. Stefan Szeider.

Thekla and Guanping joined just recently, Neha is close to completion of her PhD

This semester’s EPILOG event, at which the Faculty of Informatics presents and honors excellent students and their Master theses, was a successful one for two Master students who wrote their thesis in the Algorithms and Complexity group.

Raphael Löffler received one of the two Best Poster Awards for the poster on his thesis “An Interactive Optimization Framework for Point Feature Label Placement”, supervised by Martin Nöllenburg and Fabian Klute. Among a competition of over 100 posters, Raphael convinced the EPILOG jury with his poster design and the clarity of exposition.

Raphael