From September 24 to 26, the 33rd International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization took place in Norrköping, Sweden. As every year, the conference hosted the Graph Drawing Contest, in which student teams from TU Wien participated in several categories as part of the Master course Graph Drawing Algorithms taught by Martin Nöllenburg.

Winning Team in the Creative Contest 2025: Guilherme Monteiro Oliveira, Florian Saß, Jakob Speitkamp (from left to right)

In the creative contest, participants were given a network and asked to design an appealing visualization that also reveals interesting insights into the underlying data. This year's topic centered on the Netflix series Dark: Nodes in the graph represented events in the series with their involved characters, and edges captured the cause-and-effect relationships among them. In contrast to previous years, participants had the unique opportunity to design a 360° visualization that was displayed in Norrköping's decision arena, a cylindrical 360-degree high-resolution display with a diameter of 6 meters. In this category, our student team of Florian Saß, Jakob Speitkamp, and Guilherme Monteiro Oliveira (supervised by Thomas Depian) won the first prize for their submission "Journey of a Time Machine".

"Journey of a Time Machine" displayed on the 360° screen of the decision arena

In the automatic live challenge, the task was to compute layouts for several different graphs of increasing size and complexity within a timeframe of one hour. The produced layouts had to use straight edges with the aim of minimizing the maximum number of crossings on any single edge. The participating teams designed and implemented their own highly efficient algorithms for this task prior to the contest and competed against each other in the live challenge. Again, our student teams (supervised by Simon D. Fink) excelled with their respective software developed in the Graph Drawing Algorithms course: Christoph Weber won the second prize, and the team of Stefan Brandmair and Luca Marius Cobzaru reached third place.

Congratulations to all our successful students!

Winners of the 3rd place in the automatic live challenge: Stefan Brandmair and Luca Marius Cobzaru