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.

Congratulations to André Schidler, who successfully defended his PhD thesis “Scalability for SAT-based combinatorial problem solving” today.

Thanks to the evaluation committee: Armin Biere, Daniel Le Berre, João Marques-Silva, and Nysret Musliu.

Congratulations to Vaidyanathan P.R., who successfully defended his PhD thesis Scalable Bayesian Network Structure Learning using SAT-based Methods today.

Thanks to the evaluation committee (Christian Fermüller, Pekka Parviainen, Martina Seidl, and Sebastian Ordyniak).

Congratulations to Nikolaus Frohner, who successfully defended his PhD thesis “Advancing State Space Search for Static and Dynamic Optimization by Parallelization and Learning” today.

Thanks to the evaluation committee: Christian Blum, Luca di Gaspero, Sophie Parragh, and Nysret Musliu.

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.

Rupert Ettrich, Marc Huber, and Günther Raidl received the Best Paper Award for their paper A Policy-Based Learning Beam Search for Combinatorial Optimization at the 23rd Europen Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization held in Brno, Czech Republic, from April 12-14.

Leroy Chew and Alexis de Colnet just joined the Algorithms and Complexity group as PIs of their own FWF ESPRIT Projects:

• QBF Proofs and Certificates (FWF ESP 197, PI: Leroy Chew)
• Overcoming Intractability in the Knowledge Compilation Map (FWF ESP 235, PI: Alexis de Colnet)

Congratulations to Leroy and Alexis for winning these competitively awarded project grants!

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.

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