On August 22, 2022, this year’s OCG Incentive Award was presented during the DEXA 2022 conference in Vienna. Theresa Neubauer, graduate student at TU Wien Informatics and scientist at VRVis Biomedical Image Informatics Research Group, was honored for her master’s thesis “Volumetric Tumor Segmentation on Multimodal Medical Images using Deep Learning”. Neubauer wrote her thesis under the direction of Katja Bühler and was supervised by Maria Wimmer (VRVis). The medical questions were developed together with professor Thomas Beyer from MedUni Vienna. Professor Eduard Gröller, Head of the Research Unit for Computer Graphics at TU Wien Informatics, supervised the thesis.

“I am pleased about the OCG Incentive Award, which is a nice recognition for my research group at VRVis and me. The award shows that the great effort and commitment that a master thesis in the applied research area means was worth it. In my research, it is important to me to work on topics meaningfully applied in practice, bringing real added value to people. The resulting collaboration between VRVis, the Medical University of Vienna, and TU Wien Informatics show that the development of artificial intelligence solutions requires a combination between science and practice and does not take place on the researchers’ own but in interdisciplinary exchange. For me, this is also exactly what the Austrian Computer Society stands for: IT solutions that put people at the center, which is why the sponsorship award is also an exceptional honor for me,” Neubauer emphasized.

Fabio Francisco Oberweger, graduate student at TU Wien Informatics, was awarded the OCG Incentive Prize for his thesis “Large Neighborhood Search for the Staff Rerostering Problem”. He developed a Machine Learning (ML) augmented Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) to solve the Staff Rerostering Problem (SRRP). The SRRP is a combinatorial scheduling problem that deals with disruptions to an existing work schedule, such as employee sick leave or changes in staffing requirements. The goal of the SRRP is to create a new work plan that considers these disruptions and makes as few changes as possible to the original plan. Oberweger wrote his excellent thesis within the logic and computation program, supervised by professor Günther Raidl.

“I remember seeing my bachelor thesis supervisor at the time, Sebastian Neumaier from TU Wien, receiving the OCG Incentive Award 2016, and I thought to myself, I’ll never achieve something like that – and now I’ve done it,” Oberweger expresses his delight.

About the OCG Incentive Award

The Austrian Computer Society OCG annually awards the OCG Incentive Award to promote excellent degree theses in informatics and business informatics. The winners share the prize money of 2000 Euros. This year, 3 winners were honored: Theresa Neubauer (VRVis/TU Wien Informatics), Fabio Francisco Oberweger (TU Wien Informatics), and Martin Plattner (University of Innsbruck).

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