On January 20, 2023, Kurt Matyas, TU Wien Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs, and Daniel Löcker, Head of the Municipal Department of Science and Research Funding and Scholarships, presented the 2022 Diploma Thesis Awards of the City of Vienna at TU Wien’s Kuppelsaal. This prize is awarded once a year for outstanding diploma theses.

Andreas Auer from TU Wien Informatics won the City of Vienna Diploma Thesis Award for his thesis “VT-KGNN: A valid time knowledge graph neural network”, supervised by Emanuel Sallinger and Markus Nissl from the Research Unit Databases and Artificial Intelligence. Auer investigates and develops methods to fill or predict missing information in knowledge graphs, a type of “intelligent” database from symbolic AI. In particular, Auer focuses on so-called “temporal knowledge graphs”, which additionally model temporal aspects of given information. The developed method uses graph neural networks and is thus able to predict facts for unknown entities at the time of training. Furthermore, the process successfully uses the temporal information in the knowledge graph to improve the prediction.

Auer concludes: “I am pleased about the award, especially from the City of Vienna, which I got to know and love during my studies. Such recognition also provides further motivation for my current doctoral studies. I would also like to express special thanks to my supervisors, Emanuel Sallinger and Markus Nissl, without whom the work would not have been possible.”

Andreas Auer is currently a PreDoc Researcher at JKU Linz’s Machine Learning Institute.

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