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Alexander Beiser receives ASAI Master Thesis Prize 2026!

  • 2026-11-05
  • CAIML
  • Excellence
  • Students
  • Focus AI+DS

We are delighted to announce that Alexander Beiser has won the ASAI Master Thesis Prize!

Alexander Beiser
Alexander Beiser
Picture: Klaus Ranger / TU Wien Informatics

The Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ASAI) has awarded Alexander Beiser the Master Thesis Prize 2026 for his thesis “Novel Techniques for Circumventing the ASP Bottleneck”. With the prize, which is supported by the Federal Ministry for Infrastructure, Mobility and Innovation (BMIMI) and endowed with €2000, ASAI promotes young researchers in a subfield of Artificial Intelligence.

Alexander’s thesis tackles a central scalability problem of Answer Set Programming (ASP), the so-called grounding bottleneck. Replacing a program’s variables with all their possible values can blow it up exponentially, which leaves many industrial problems out of reach. Body-decoupled grounding (BDG) eases this bottleneck, but it could not be combined with traditional grounders and performed poorly on normal and non-tight programs. The thesis addresses both limitations. With hybrid grounding, BDG and traditional grounding each take over the parts of a program they handle best, and heuristics decide the split automatically. This solves about 35% more instances on grounding-heavy benchmarks while staying on par on solving-heavy ones. The new techniques FastFound and Lazy-BDG substantially improve BDG on normal and non-tight programs, outperforming both the original BDG and the state-of-the-art grounders gringo and idlv on synthetic benchmarks. The work formed the basis of three peer-reviewed publications.

The thesis was supervised by Stefan Woltran, Head of the Research Unit Databases and Artificial Intelligence and Co-Head of CAIML, and Markus Hecher.

About the Awardee

Alexander holds a BSc in Software & Information Engineering (2023) and an MSc in Logic & Computation (2025) from TU Wien. Alexander now continues his research as a PhD candidate at CAIML, developing AI methods for air traffic management in collaboration with Frequentis.

The ASAI Prize is the latest in a series of distinctions for Alexander’s thesis, following the Best Master Thesis Award of TU Wien Informatics and the Diplomarbeitspreis der Stadt Wien 2025.

Congratulations, Alexander on this outstanding achievement!

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