The Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ASAI) honors exceptional researchers for their work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the ASAI Master Thesis Award. This year, 1st prize went to Viktor Besin from TU Wien Informatics for his Master’s Thesis “A Novel Method for Grounding in Answer-Set Programming”. The ASAI Master Thesis Award is endowed with €2000.

In his thesis, Viktor Besin focuses on Answer-Set Programming (ASP), which is a declarative programming paradigm used to solve problems in AI, especially in the field of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR). A declarative programming paradigm is a style of programming that specifies what a program is supposed to accomplish, without explicitly defining how the program achieves it. One key challenge in ASP is grounding, i.e., converting a high-level problem into low-level logical rules by replacing variables with specific values. Grounding affects the performance of ASP systems and can sometimes result in a “grounding bottleneck,” where the rule set becomes too large to process for an ASP solver.

Viktor Besin’s thesis introduces a new method to make ASP more efficient. This new approach separates non-ground parts of rules, allowing them to be evaluated during the solving process. Translations are provided for different types of programs to keep the complexity manageable, especially when the number of different values (predicate arity) is limited. The technical feasibility of this new method is demonstrated with the implementation of a prototype and compared to state-of-the-art ASP technology. Results show that this novel approach is competitive with existing ASP systems in terms of grounding size, grounding time, and total runtime. The main results of the thesis have been published at the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’22) and the 26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI’23).

Viktor Besin was supervised by Stefan Woltran, Head of the Research Unit Databases and Artificial Intelligence and Co-Head of CAIML, as well as by Markus Hecher.

About the Awardee

Viktor Besin received his Bachlor’s degree in Software and Information Engineering and his Master’s Degree in Software Engineering and Internet Computing from TU Wien Informatics. During that time, he was also a Project Assistant, sumbitting multiple contributions at conferences like the 37th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP’21), the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’22), and the 6th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI’23). He currently works in the private sector, but still keeps up-to-date with the latest developments in academia in the field of Software Engineering.

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