TU Wien Informatics

20 Years

Dissertation awarded with the national “Award of Excellence”

  • 2018-12-05
  • Award
  • Doctoral School

Eduard Eiben has got his award from the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF) for his outstanding dissertation in Vienna on 5 December.

Eduard Eiben has been awarded for his dissertation “Exploiting new types of structure for fixed-parameter tractability”. The work was carried out as part of a research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF at the Institute for Logic and Computation at the Faculty of Informatics. Other members of the project team were Prof. Stefan Szeider (project leader) and Dr. med. Robert Ganian, who also supervised the excellent dissertation.

Since 2008, the 40 best doctoral theses have been awarded annually for the “Award of Excellence”, which is endowed with EUR 3,000, across all disciplines.

In his dissertation, Dr. Ing. Eiben developed efficient algorithms for hard-to-solve computational problems that occur in artificial intelligence and optimization. The methodology of the work follows the paradigm of parametric complexity theory. “Parametric complexity theory has revolutionized algorithmics by allowing it to take into account the structural properties of problem inputs and exploit them algorithmically,” says Prof. Szeider. The development of new concepts to mathematically capture such structural properties was one of the main goals of Eiben’s dissertation.

Eduard Eiben is the first graduate of the Doctoral Program “Logical Methods in Computer Science” (LogiCS), which was founded in 2014 by professors at TU Wien, Graz University of Technology, and JKU Linz.

“I am particularly pleased that an algorithmic work has been awarded, because algorithms will in future gain an increasingly important role in technological innovation,” says Prof. Georg Gottlob, who heads the LogiCS Doctoral College. The Doctoral College includes not only mathematical methods of formal logic but also applied topics such as verification, databases, distributed and cyber-physical systems and information security. More than 40 young researchers from 20 countries, about one third of them women, already find the optimal breeding ground for their enthusiasm for logic and their application in informatics at TU Wien. After a thorough evaluation by international experts in 2017, the FWF will invest another 3.6 million euros in the doctoral program. Research at the Faculty of Informatics of the TU Wien is also gaining a major boost by the Vienna Center of Logic and Algorithms (VCLA), a center of excellence in logic and algorithms.

Links

Curious about our other news? Subscribe to our news feed, calendar, or newsletter, or follow us on social media.

Note: This is one of the thousands of items we imported from the old website. We’re in the process of reviewing each and every one, but if you notice something strange about this particular one, please let us know. — Thanks!