The 31st edition of the International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization in Palermo, Italy, ended on September 22, 2023, with a large number of awards and prizes for members and students of the Algorithms and Complexity Group.

We congratulate Markus Wallinger and his co-authors Felix Klesen, Jacob Miller, Fabrizio Montecchiani, and Martin Nöllenburg for the best poster award 2023 on their poster “What happens at Dagstuhl? Uncovering Patterns through Visualization”.

Furthermore, the annual Graph Drawing Contest honored multiple contributions in the following categories:

Creative Topic: Board game recommendation graph. 15 international

Anaïs Villedieu successfully defended her PhD thesis “Engineering Human-in-the-loop Graph Drawing Algorithms” on July 24, 2023. Congratulations, Dr. Villedieu!

Anaïs was a PhD student in the FWF project “Human-centered Algorithm Engineering” and was supervised by Martin Nöllenburg. Her external thesis reviewers were Seokhee Hong and Philipp Kindermann.

Markus Wallinger, Alexander Dobler, and Martin Nöllenburg received the Best Paper Award for their paper LinSets.zip: Compressing Linear Set Diagrams at the 16th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium held in Seoul, Korea from April 18-21.

Alexander Dobler received the Best Student Paper Award at the 13th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams (DIAGRAMS 2022) in Rome in September 2022 for his paper “On Computing Optimal Linear Diagrams“, co-authored with his PhD advisor Martin Nöllenburg.

Guangping Li successfully defended her PhD thesis “An Algorithmic Study of Practical Map Labeling” on May 13, 2022. Congratulations, Dr. Li!

Guangping was a PhD student in the FWF project “Human-centered Algorithm Engineering” and was supervised by Martin Nöllenburg. Her external thesis reviewers were Kevin Buchin and Christian Schulz. Guangping has already started a postdoc position at TU Dortmund, Germany.

On October 1, 2020, Dr. Manuel Sorge has joined the Algorithms and Complexity group with a prestigious Feodor Lynen postdoc fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Manuel has received his PhD in 2016 from TU Berlin and has worked as a postdoc researcher at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel and at Warsaw University, Poland. In his two-year project at TU Wien he will investigate network analysis and visualization problems by exploiting knowledge about inherent structures of complex networks, such as their structural sparsity or properties of overlapping clusters. Together

The 27th annual Graph Drawing Contest, held (virtually) in conjunction with the 28th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD) in Vancouver on September 15-18, 2020 was a big success for our TU Wien graph drawing students, winning the first prize in both creative categories, as well as one second prize and one third prize. Three out of these four layouts were created as part of the coursework for the lecture Graph Drawing Algorithms (taught by Martin Nöllenburg and Soeren Nickel).

The 2020 contest comprised two creative topics: the

Fabian Klute successfully defended his PhD thesis “Avoiding Crossings in Non-Planar Graph Layouts” on March 13, 2020. Congratulations!

Fabian was supervised by Martin Nöllenburg. His thesis reviewers were Fabrizio Frati and Stephen Kobourov. Fabian is now a postdoc at Utrecht University.

Soeren Nickel, who recently joined the Algorithms and Complexity Group as a PhD student, won the Distinguished Young Alumn Award at the 29th EPILOG event of the Faculty of Informatics. With this award the Faculty of Informatics honors Soeren’s outstanding Master thesis “Generating Stable Demers and Iso-Hexagon Cartograms” as well as his excellent EPILOG presentation.

Soeren’s thesis, supervised by Martin Nöllenburg, presents algorithms and complexity results for computing value-by-area square and hexagon cartograms to display spatiotemporal data as a highly abstract map. It has already been presented at the International Symposium

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