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

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