Effective as of today, Robert Ganian is promoted to a tenured Associate Professor at the Algorithms and Complexity group. Congratulations, Robert!

Congratulations to Jan Dreier for his LICS 2021 Distinguished Paper Award for his paper Lacon- and Shrub-Decompositions: A New Characterization of First-Order Transductions of Bounded Expansion Classes.

Here is a link to the video of his presentation.

Stefan Szeider and Martin Kronegger gave a lecture on Algorithms and Programming to members of the Austrian Parliament.

The lecture consisted of three parts and concluded with a Q&A session with the MPs and ended with a live programming demonstration.

The Algorithms lecture took place on June 15th, 2021, in the same venue where usually the plenary discussions of the Austrian parliament take place, the “great Redoutensaal,” a beautiful hall located in Vienna’s Hofburg.

This lecture was part of the Faculty of Informatic’s initiative Digitale Kompetenzen (digital competence), consisting of several lectures on

Congratulations to our former students Martin Riedler and Tomas Peitl for receiving this outstanding award of a Promotio Sub Auspiciis Praesidentis Rei Publica (Doctoral graduation under the auspices of the Federal President). Each year, only a handful  of doctoral students from Austria receive this special award, which requires excellent grades throughout secondary school, undergraduate and graduate studies.

We are specially proud that two students from our group receive this honour this year.

The ceremony took place with over year’s delay due to the Covid pandemic.

News post at TU Wien’s website.

By December 1st, 2020, our colleague Martin Nöllenburg has been promoted to Full Professor for Graph and Geometric Algorithms. 

See here 5 Questions with … Martin Nöllenburg from last year.

Congratulations to Martin Kronegger who received a Best Teaching Award 2020 from TU Wien.

The Algorithms and Complexity group is very happy about Martin’s engagement in the Algorithms and Data Structures course, which received a nomination for the Best Distance Learning Award 2020 for its digitalisation of the course during the COVID-19 restrictions in Spring 2020.

Tomáš Peitl and Stefan Szeider won the Best Paper Award at the main track of CP’2020, the 26th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, for their paper: “Finding the Hardest Formulas for Resolution”.

Congratulations!

In the paper, a  resolution-based method (CDCL SAT solver) is used to find the hardest formulas for resolution, which constitutes a self reference as greatly illustrated by MC Escher in his lithograph “Drawing Hands (1948).

Abstract: A CNF formula is harder than another CNF formula with the same number of clauses if it requires a longer resolution proof.

Robert Ganian who receives an FWF START Prize for his project Parameterized Analysis in Artificial Intelligence.

The FWF START prize is comparable in competitiveness and funding to an ERC starting grant.

Out of 111 applications over all scientific disciplines, 7 START prizes where awarded.

Congratulations!

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