Alumnus of the LogiCS doctoral college funded by the FWF

Eduard Eiben received the national Award of Excellence by the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF) for his outstanding dissertation. The award ceremony took place in Vienna on December 5th, 2018. Eduard Eiben has been awarded for his dissertation “Exploiting new types of structure for fixed-parameter tractability”. The work was carried out as part of a research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF at the Institute for Logic and Computation at the Faculty of Informatics at TU Wien. The supervisors were Prof. Stefan Szeider and Dr. Robert Ganian.

Since 2008, the 40 best doctoral theses across all disciplines have been awarded annually with the “Award of Excellence”, which is endowed with EUR 3,000.

In his dissertation, Dr. Eiben developed efficient algorithms for hard-to-solve computational problems that occur in artificial intelligence and optimization. The methodology of the work follows the paradigm of parametric complexity. “Parametric complexity has revolutionized algorithmics by allowing it to take into account the structural properties of problem inputs and exploit them algorithmically,” says Prof. Szeider. The development of new concepts to mathematically capture such structural properties was one of the main goals of Eiben’s dissertation.

Eduard Eiben is the first graduate of the Doctoral Program “Logical Methods in Computer Science” (LogiCS), which was founded in 2014 by professors at TU Wien, TU Graz, and JKU Linz. Eduard is currently continuing his research at the University of Bergen as a post-doc.

“I am particularly pleased that an algorithmic work has been awarded, because algorithms will in future gain an increasingly important role in technological innovation,” says Prof. Georg Gottlob, the head of the LogiCS Doctoral College. The Doctoral College includes not only mathematical methods of formal logic but also applied topics such as verification, databases, distributed and cyber-physical systems and information security. More than 40 young researchers from 20 countries, about one third of them women, have already found the optimal research environment for their enthusiasm for logic and their application at the Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien. After a thorough evaluation by international experts in 2017, the FWF has invested another 3.6 million euros in the doctoral program.

Research at the Faculty of Informatics of the TU Wien is also gaining a major boost by the Vienna Center of Logic and Algorithms (VCLA), a center of excellence in logic and algorithms.