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 Research Unit. Graph Drawing is like creating a map that helps us understand and explore complex webs of connections easily. It’s a key part of Network Visualization, where we turn complicated data into visible, interactive and understandable images. Imagine it as turning a dense novel into a vivid comic book, making it easier to read, understand, and explore. The symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization has been the main event in this area for 30 years. Its focus is on combinatorial and algorithmic aspects of graph drawing as well as the design of network visualization systems and interfaces.

Markus Wallinger and his co-authors Felix Klesen, Jacob Miller, Fabrizio Montecchiani, and Martin Nöllenburg won the Best Poster Award 2023 on their poster “What happens at Dagstuhl? Uncovering Patterns through Visualization”.

The annual Graph Drawing Contest honored multiple contributions to the creative topic and live challenge category. Especially our students excelled this year, ranked in the top 3 of both categories.

• Creative Topic Awards: 15 international teams submitted their best visualizations of a “board game recommendation” graph. The contest committee selected the best contributions based on both their aesthetic and design aspects, as well as their data readability and clarity of the graph structure. Our student team Christoph Kern, Manuel Oberbacher and Horst Zahradnik won the first prize for their submission “Journey through the board game universe”, which they prepared in the course Graph Drawing Algorithms. Our student team Florentina Voboril, Felicia Schmidt and Viktoria Pogrzebacz won the third prize for their submission “Find your next favorite board game”, also prepared as part of the coursework of Graph Drawing Algorithms.

• Live Challenge: In both a manual and an automatic category, teams had to embed a given graph with straight edges on a pre-specified point set while minimizing the resulting edge crossings. In total, 19 teams participated in the manual challenge and 7 in the automatic one, where they could use their own software to optimize the given instances. Our student team Saman Miran, Jakub Nawrocki, Hesham Morgan won the second prize in the automatic category with a crossing minimization software developed in the course Graph Drawing Algorithms. The first-prize in the manual category included our student Florentina Voboril, together with Tim Hegemann and Johannes Zink from the University of Würzburg. The second prize in the manual category went to Robert Ganian and Martin Nöllenburg, together with their colleague Maarten Löffler (Utrecht University). The third prize in the manual category went to Alexander Dobler and Jules Wulms.

Visit the Research Unit’s website to get more info on the winning posters and vizualisations.

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