The 28th Annual Graph Drawing Contest, a long running tradition of the graph drawing research community, was held in conjunction with the 29th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2021), hosted in Tübingen from the 14th to the 17th of September, 2021.
The contest is comprised of various categories. In the creative topics participants are provided with network data and tasked to design an informative but at the same time aesthetically pleasing layout of these networks.

In this category TU Wien was represented by two submissions, both of which

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.

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

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!