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!

Fabian Klute successfully defended his PhD thesis “Avoiding Crossings in Non-Planar Graph Layouts” on March 13, 2020. Congratulations!

Fabian was supervised by Martin Nöllenburg. His thesis reviewers were Fabrizio Frati and Stephen Kobourov. Fabian is now a postdoc at Utrecht University.

Benedikt Klocker successfully defended his PhD thesis “Combinatorial Optimization Approaches for Graph Construction Problems” on March 25, 2020. Congratulations!

Benedikt was supervised by Günther Raidl and co-supervised by Herbert Fleischner.

Soeren Nickel, who recently joined the Algorithms and Complexity Group as a PhD student, won the Distinguished Young Alumn Award at the 29th EPILOG event of the Faculty of Informatics. With this award the Faculty of Informatics honors Soeren’s outstanding Master thesis “Generating Stable Demers and Iso-Hexagon Cartograms” as well as his excellent EPILOG presentation.

Soeren’s thesis, supervised by Martin Nöllenburg, presents algorithms and complexity results for computing value-by-area square and hexagon cartograms to display spatiotemporal data as a highly abstract map. It has already been presented at the International Symposium

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

Two submissions of graph layouts from the Algorithms and Complexity Group were successful in the 26th Graph Drawing Contest, which was held in conjunction with the 27th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD) in Průhonice near Prague in September 2019.

PhD students Guangping Li, Soeren Nickel and their advisor Martin Nöllenburg from the Algorithms and Complexity Group together with their colleagues Hsiang-Yun Wu and Ivan Viola from the Visualization Group of TU Wien won the First Prize in the category “Creative Topics: Meal Ingredients”. In this category the

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.