Two papers co-authored by our ESPRIT fellow Sara Di Bartolomeo received awards during the EuroVis 2025 conference, held June 2-6 in Luxembourg. The Best Paper Award went to the paper “NODKANT: Exploring Constructive Network Physicalization” written by Sara together with her co-authors Daniel Paar, Henry Ehlers, Velitchko Filipov, Christina Stoiber, Wolfgang Aigner, Hsiang-Yun Wu, and Renata Raidou. This paper explores how constructing physical models of graph data can improve people’s understanding of complex information.

A second paper, “Optimizing Staircase Motifs in Biofabric Network Layouts​”, written by Sara Di Bartolomeo, Markus Wallinger,

Markus Wallinger, who did his PhD in the Algorithms and Complexity group in 2024, received the EuroVis PhD Award for his thesis “Exploring Graph-based Concepts for Balanced Information Density in Data Visualizations” last week during the EuroVis conference in Luxembourg. This year’s EuroVis PhD Award was awarded to three young researchers and recognizes outstanding dissertations in academic research and development on topics relevant to visualization. Markus’ thesis was supervised by Martin Nöllenburg and supported by the WWTF grant “Engineering Linear Ordering Algorithms for Optimizing Data Visualizations”. Markus is now a postdoctoral

Thomas Depian, Simon D. Fink, Alexander Firbas, Robert Ganian, and Martin Nöllenburg received the Best Paper Award for their paper Pathways to Tractability for Geometric Thickness [arXiv] at the 50th International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science (SOFSEM) held in Bratislava, Slovakia from January 20-23, 2025.

Our former group member Markus Wallinger won the Award of Excellence by the Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research. This state prize is awarded annually to 40 outstanding dissertations completed at all Austrian universities and in all subjects. Markus, as one of only four researchers of TU Wien, received this prestigious award on December 5, 2024 for his dissertation “Exploring Graph-based Concepts for Balanced Information Density in Data Visualizations”, supervised by Martin Nöllenburg. Markus is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Efficient Algorithms at TU Munich. Congratulations,

Our group member Thomas Depian won the Appreciation Award given by the Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research. This state prize is awarded annually to the best 55 Master graduates among each year’s about 16.000 graduates of all Austrian universities. In 2024 Thomas, as one of only two students of TU Wien, received this prestigious award for his Master’s thesis “Grouping and Ordering Constraints in Boundary Labeling”, supervised by Martin Nöllenburg. Thomas will present the results of his thesis at the 35th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC’24)

Maria Bresich, Günther Raidl, and Steffen Limmer received the best paper award at the 2024 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2024) for their contribution Letting a Large Neighborhood Search for an Electric Dial-A-Ride Problem Fly: On-The-Fly Charging Station Insertion. The conference took place in Melbourne, Australia, July 14-18, 2024.

On June 1, 2024, Dr. Frank Sommer has joined the Algorithms and Complexity group with a prestigious Feodor Lynen postdoc fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Frank has received his PhD in 2022 from Philipps-Universität Marburg in Germany, and has worked as a postdoc researcher at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in Germany. In his one-year project at TU Wien he will investigate machine learning models such as decision trees and neural networks by exploiting specific input structures leading to input parameters which can be assumed to be small in practice. Together with

Our best Master thesis awardee last year, Esra Ceylan, won the OCG award 2024 for her Master’s thesis, supervised by Jiehua Chen! Congratulations!

The ceremony will take place at the Austrian Computer Science Day on June 14th:

https://acsd2024.univie.ac.at/program/

Markus Wallinger successfully defended his PhD thesis “Exploring Graph-based Concepts for Balanced Information Density in Data Visualizations” on April 26, 2024. Congratulations, Dr. Wallinger!

Markus was a PhD student in the Algorithms and Complexity Group and worked in the project Engineering Linear Ordering Algorithms for Optimizing Data Visualizations funded by WWTF. He was supervised by Martin Nöllenburg and his external thesis reviewers were Christophe Hurter and Stephen Kobourov. Markus will continue his academic path as a postdoc at TU Munich.

Soeren Terziadis successfully defended his PhD thesis “Algorithms for Schematic Representations” on January 9, 2024. Congratulations, Dr. Terziadis!

Soeren was a PhD student in the Algorithms and Complexity Group and was supervised by Martin Nöllenburg. His external thesis reviewers were Will Evans and Sabine Storandt. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at TU Eindhoven.