Updates

News, events, and activities

2025

Dec 11
📰 New PhD: Alexander Dobler
Alexander Dobler successfully defended his PhD thesis "Algorithmic Aspects of Ordering Problems in Information Visualization" on December 11, 2025. Congratulations, Dr. Dobler!
Dec 04
🎤 What Happens When Computers Go Quantum?
Hartmut Neven (Google Quantum AI) will give a talk titled 'What Happens When Computers Go Quantum?' on December 04, 2025 at 15:30. Location: Luftpavillon, Karlsplatz 13, Hof 2.
Nov 05
📰 Herbert Fleischner (1944-2025)
We are deeply saddened by the passing of Herbert Fleischner, friend and colleague. Herbert was a distinguished graph theorist whose work, including the famous Fleischner's theorem, shaped the field. Read our full obituary here.
Sep 26
📰 Three Contest Awards for Graph Drawing Student Teams
From September 24 to 26, the 33rd International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization took place in Norrköping, Sweden.
Sep 19
📰 Second Place in the PACE Challenge for a Team of AC Group Researchers
The Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments (PACE) Challenge takes place annually as part of the International Symposium on Parameterized and Exact Computation (IPEC) to deepen the relationship between parameterized algorithms and practice.
Sep 17
📰 COMSOC 2025 Begins - Computational Social Choice
September 17-19, 2025 · TU Wien, Vienna, Austria Quick Facts Find the full program and registration details on the official site: Visit COMSOC 2025 Website Contact
Sep 16
🎤 Learning and Belief Revision: an Overview
Nina Gierasimczuk will give a talk titled 'Learning and Belief Revision: an Overview' on September 16, 2025 at 17:30. Location: Online via Zoom.
Jun 23
🎤 Axioms as rules in intuitionistic logic
Sara Negri will give a talk titled 'Axioms as rules in intuitionistic logic' on June 23, 2025 at 17:00. Location: Online via Zoom.
Jun 13
📰 Best Paper Award and Honourable Mention at EuroVis 2025
Two papers co-authored by our ESPRIT fellow Sara Di Bartolomeo received awards during the EuroVis 2025 conference, held June 2-6 in Luxembourg.
Jun 13
📰 Markus Wallinger receives EuroVis PhD Award
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.
Jun 11
🎤 Towards Formalizing Cyclic Tableaux and Interpolation for PDL in Lean
Malvin Gattinger will give a talk titled 'Towards Formalizing Cyclic Tableaux and Interpolation for PDL in Lean' on June 11, 2025 at 16:00. Location: Gußhausstraße 27-29, Seminar Room 127 (third floor).
Mar 19
🎤 Logic and Computation of Social Behavior
Sonja Smets will give a talk titled 'Logic and Computation of Social Behavior' on March 19, 2025 at 17:00. Location: Online via Zoom.
Feb 27
🎤 Codd’s Theorem for Databases over Semirings
Guillermo Badia will give a talk titled 'Codd’s Theorem for Databases over Semirings' on February 27, 2025 at 17:00. Location: Favoritenstrasse 9-11, FAV Lecture Hall 2 (ground floor).
Feb 05
🎤 Classical versus Constructive: An Ecumenical Approach
Elaine Pimentel will give a talk titled 'Classical versus Constructive: An Ecumenical Approach' on February 05, 2025 at 16:00. Location: Online via Zoom - link for registration below.
Jan 24
🎤 Explanatory Proofs: From Logic to Mathematics
A talk titled 'Explanatory Proofs: From Logic to Mathematics' on January 24, 2025 at 17:00. Location: Online via Zoom.
Jan 23
📰 Best Paper Award at SOFSEM 2025
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,
Jan 14
🎤 Trustable Explainable AI -- A Redemption by Logic
Joao Marques-Silva will give a talk titled 'Trustable Explainable AI -- A Redemption by Logic' on January 14, 2025 at 17:00. Location: zoom and youtube.

2024

Dec 09
🎤 NL interface of PROLEG system and extracting normative sentences from German traffic judgements
Ken Satoh (NII Tokyo) will give a talk titled 'NL interface of PROLEG system and extracting normative sentences from German traffic judgements' on December 09, 2024 at 14:30. Location: Favoritenstrasse 9-11, Seminar Room FAV 3 Zemanek.
Dec 05
📰 Markus Wallinger receives Award of Excellence for his PhD Thesis
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.
Nov 21
📰 Thomas Depian receives State Prize for his Master's Thesis
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.
Jul 24
📰 Best Paper Award at GECCO 2024 for M. Bresich, G. Raidl, and S. Limmer
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 .
Jun 14
📰 Welcome to our Feodor Lynen Fellow Dr. Frank Sommer
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.
May 31
📰 Esra Ceylan won the OCG Award 2024
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/
Apr 26
📰 New PhD: Markus Wallinger
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!
Jan 09
📰 PhD completed by Soeren Terziadis
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 .

2023

Dec 06
📰 Informatics Awards 2023
The Algorithms and Complexity group was very successful at the Informatics Awards 2023 : André Schidler won the Best Dissertation Award for his thesis Scalability for SAT-based Combinatorial Problem Solving (supervised by Stefan Szeider ).
Oct 18
📰 Jiehua Chen: promotion to tenured Associate Professor
After her successful tenure evaluation, our colleague Jiehua Chen has been promoted to an Associate Professor. Hua joined the Algorithms and Complexity group at TU Wien in 2019.
Sep 23
📅 Successful Graph Drawing conference 2023 in Palermo
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.
Jul 24
📰 PhD completed by Anaïs Villedieu
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 .
May 31
📰 PhD completed by Andre Schidler
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.
May 12
📰 PhD completed by Vaidyanathan P.R.
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).
May 11
📰 PhD completed by Nikolaus Frohner
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.
Apr 22
📰 Best paper award at IEEE PacificVis 2023
Markus Wallinger , Alexander Dobler , and Martin Nöllenburg received the Best Paper Award for their paper LinSets.zip: Compressing Linear Set Diagram s at the 16th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium held in Seoul, Korea from April 18-21.
Apr 14
📰 Best paper award at EvoCOP 2023
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.

2022

Nov 09
📰 New FWF ESPRIT Postdocs
Leroy Chew and Alexis de Colnet just joined the Algorithms and Complexity group as PIs of their own FWF ESPRIT Projects: Congratulations to Leroy and Alexis for winning these competitively awarded project grants!
Oct 01
📰 Best student paper award at DIAGRAMS 2022
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 .
Jul 01
📰 Robert Ganian promoted to Associate Professor
Effective as of today, Robert Ganian is promoted to a tenured Associate Professor at the Algorithms and Complexity group. Congratulations, Robert!
May 24
📰 Best paper award at EvoCOP 2022
Jonas Mayerhofer, Markus Kirchweger, Marc Huber, and Günther Raidl received the best paper award for their work A Beam Search for the Shortest Common Supersequence Problem Guided by an Approximate Expected Length Calculation at the 22nd European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization being held in Madrid, Spain, in Ap
May 13
📰 New PhD: Guangping Li
Guangping Li successfully defended her PhD thesis "An Algorithmic Study of Practical Map Labeling" on May 13, 2022. Congratulations, Dr. Li! Guangping was a PhD student in the FWF project " Human-centered Algorithm Engineering " and was supervised by Martin Nöllenburg . Her external thesis reviewers were Kevin Buchin and Christian Schulz .

2021

Sep 24
📰 Outstanding results for TU Wien students at the 2021 Graph Drawing Contest
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.
Jul 02
📰 Jan Dreier receives a LICS'21 Distinguished Paper Award
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.
Jun 16
🎤 Lecture at Austrian Parliament
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.
Jun 14
📰 Promotio Sub Auspiciis Praesidentis Rei Publica
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).

2020

Dec 17
📰 Martin Nöllenburg: promotion to Full Professor
By December 1st, 2020, our colleague Martin Nöllenburg has been promoted to Full Professor for Graph and Geometric Algorithms. Martin has joined the Algorithms and Complexity group at TU Wien in September 2015 and was promoted to Associated professor in 2017.
Oct 23
📰 Martin Kronegger wins the Best Teaching Award 2020
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 restrictio
Oct 12
📰 Welcome to our Feodor Lynen Fellow Dr. Manuel Sorge
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 .
Oct 01
📰 TU Wien students excel at the 2020 Graph Drawing Contest
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 p
Sep 11
📰 Best Paper Award at CP'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!
Jun 17
📰 Robert Ganian receives an FWF START prize
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!
Mar 16
📰 New PhD: Fabian Klute
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 .
Mar 03
📰 New PhD: Benedikt Klocker
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.
Jan 27
📰 Soeren Nickel wins the Distinguished Young Alumn Award
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.