The VCLA International Student Awards 2021 were presented to the exceptional winners at the 47th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS) from August 22—26, 2022 in Vienna.

Based on the international call for nominations, the award committee of eighteen internationally recognized researchers announced one Outstanding Master Thesis Award and one Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award.

Tuuka Korhonen: Outstanding Master Thesis Award

The Outstanding Master Thesis Award is awarded to Tuukka Korhonen (University of Helsinki) for his master thesis “Finding Optimal Tree Decompositions” under the supervision of Matti Järvisalo.

His decision on the topic of his master thesis was inspired by the participation at the PACE (Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge) challenge: “My advisor suggested me to participate in the PACE 2017 challenge, which I gladly did, being interested in algorithms and competitions. After PACE 2017 it was a natural direction to look into further applications of the Bouchitté-Todinca algorithm, given the generality and the unexpected practical utility of the algorithm.”

After his graduation at the University of Helsinki, Tuukka Korhonen started as a PHD student at the University of Bergen (Norway) in September 2021. His research interests are parameterized algorithms and complexity, especially topics related to tree decompositions.

Jasper Slusallek: Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award

The Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award is awarded to Jasper Slusallek (Saarland University) for his undergraduate thesis “Algorithms and Lower Bounds for Finding (Exact-Weight) Subgraphs of Bounded Treewidth” under the supervision of Karl Bringmann. His choice for his favorite undergraduate thesis topic seems to have paid off: “So originally I asked Karl (my advisor) if he had any interesting topics in fine-grained complexity or parameterized algorithms, which were my two favorite topics from any of the lectures I’d heard. He didn’t have any at first, at which point I actually started working with another professor on a possible thesis topic; but then Karl mailed me again after a couple of weeks and said he might have a topic about subgraph isomorphism and treewidth that sounded extremely cool, so after poking at it for a few days I ended up switching to that topic. Over the following months, I worked really hard on it, but we kept coming up with new related results that I wanted to include, and those always motivated me to look at the problem from a new perspective.”