The call for the 9th edition of the VCLA International Student Awards is open! The deadline has been extended to April 30, 2025.

 

The VCLA International Student Awards aim to recognize and support students all over the world for their outstanding scientific works in the field of Logic and Computer Science in two categories:

• Outstanding Master Thesis Award
• Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

Awards

• Outstanding Master Thesis Award:  1200 EUR
• Outstanding Undergraduate Research (Bachelor) Award:  800 EUR
• The winners will be invited to present their work at an award ceremony, if the situation allows

Important Dates

The current call for nominations for the VCLA International Student Awards has been published in February 2025. We accept theses for degrees awarded between Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.

There will be an award ceremony with the winners if the situation allows. Award ceremonies include a presentation by the awardees and are usually held as part of a conference or other event in Vienna.

 

In Memoriam

The award is dedicated to the memory of Helmut Veith, the brilliant computer scientist who tragically passed away in March 2016, and aims to carry on his commitment to promoting young talent and promising researchers in these areas. Another piece of Veith´s legacy, besides Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms, is the Helmut Veith Stipend for Female Master´s Students at TU Wien, Austria. Its mission is to honour the legacy of Helmut Veith in serving the field of Computer science at TU Wien and the society at large by identifying and supporting the female talents who possess the curiosity in the research fields of the late scholar.

The eighth edition of the VCLA International Student Awards 2024

The eighth edition of the VCLA International Student Awards concluded in September 2024 with the announcement of two winners and one runner-up in two award categories. The winners of the 2024 edition of the VCLA International Student Awards are:

Outstanding Master Thesis Award

• Tikhon Pshenitsyn (Lomonosov Moscow State University) for his master thesis “Hypergraph Lambek Calculus” under the supervision of Mati Pentus.

Outstanding Master Thesis Award – Runner-up

• Dieter Vandesande (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) for his master thesis “Towards Certified MaxSAT Solving: Certified MaxSAT Solving with SAT Oracles and Encodings of Pseudo-Boolean Constraints” under the supervision of Bart Bogaerts.

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

• Nathaniel Collins (University of Colorado Boulder) for his undergraduate thesis “Count-Free Weisfeiler–Leman and Group Isomorphism” under the supervision of Joshua A. Grochow.

Details

The seventh edition of the VCLA International Student Awards 2023

The seventh edition of the VCLA International Student Awards was met with great interest and concluded in the summer of 2023 with the announcement of two winners and one runner-up in two award categories. The winners of the 2023 edition of the VCLA International Student Awards are:

Outstanding Master Thesis Award

• Lydia Blümel (University of Leipzig, now FernUniversität in Hagen) for her master thesis “Defining Defense in Abstract Argumentation from Scratch – A Generalizing Approach” prepared under the supervision of Markus Ulbricht.

Outstanding Master Thesis Award – Runner-up

• Vitor Rodrigues Greati (Universidade Federal Do Rio Grande do Norte, now University of Groningen) for his master thesis “Hilbert-Style Formalism for Two-Dimensional Notions of Consequence” under the supervison of João Marcos and Sergio Marcelino.

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

• Barbora Šmahlíková (Brno University of Technology) for her undergraduate thesis “Next Generation of Rank-Based Algorithms for Omega Automata” under the supervision of Ondřej Lengál.

Details

Jules Wulms, Lydia Blümel, Robert Ganian

Jules Wulms, Vitor Rodrigues Greati, Robert Ganian

Jules Wulms, Barbora Šmahlíková, Robert Ganian, Agata Ciabattoni

The sixth edition of the VCLA International Student Awards 2021

The highly successful sixth edition of the VCLA International Student Awards was concluded in July 2021 with the announcement of two winners in two award categories. The winners of the 2021 edition of the VCLA International Student Awards are:

Outstanding Master Thesis Award

• Tuukka Korhonen (University of Helsinki) for his master thesis “Finding Optimal Tree Decompositions” prepared under the supervision of Matti Järvisalo.

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

• Jasper Slusallek ( Saarland University) for the undergraduate thesis “Algorithms and Lower Bounds for Finding (Exact-Weight) Subgraphs of Bounded Treewidth” under the supervision of Karl Bringmann.

Details

The fifth edition of the VCLA International Student Awards 2020

The highly successful fifth edition of the VCLA International Student Awards was concluded in July 2020 with the announcement of two winners in two award categories. The winners of the 2020 edition of the VCLA International Student Awards are:

Outstanding Master Thesis Award

• Karolina Okrasa (Warsaw University of Technology) for the master thesis “Complexity of variants of graph homomorphism problem in selected graph classes” under the supervision of Paweł Rzążewski.

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

• Antonin Callard (ENS Paris-Saclay) for the undergraduate thesis “Topological analysis of represented spaces and computable maps, cb0 spaces and non-countably-based spaces” under the supervision of Mathieu Hoyrup.

Details

The fourth edition of the VCLA International Student Awards 2019

The highly successful fourth edition of the VCLA International Student Awards was concluded on Friday, June 28, 2019 with the announcement of two winners in two award categories. The winners of the 2019 edition of the VCLA International Student Awards are:

Outstanding Master Thesis Award

• Martín Muñoz (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) for the master thesis Descriptive Complexity for Counting Complexity Classes under the supervision of Marcelo Arenas and Cristian Riveros.

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

• Alexej Rotar (TU München) for the undergraduate thesis The Satisfiability Problem for Fragments of PCTL under the supervision of Jan Kretinsky.

Details and the photo gallery here

The third edition of the VCLA International Student Awards 2018

The highly successful third edition of the VCLA International Student Awards was concluded on Monday, June 11, 2018, with the announcement of two winners in two award categories. The winners of the 2018 edition of the VCLA International Student Awards are:

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

• Tomáš Lamser (Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic) for his thesis “Algorithmic Analysis of Patrolling Games” under the supervision of Professor Antonín Kučera (Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic).

Outstanding Master Thesis Award

• Jeremy Liang An Kong (Imperial College London, United Kingdom) for his thesis “MCMAS-Dynamic: Symbolic Model Checking Linear Dynamic Logic” under the supervision of Professor Alessio Lomuscio (Imperial College London, United Kingdom).

Read and/or listen to the presentation of his thesis here.

Details and the photo gallery here

The second edition of the VCLA International Student Awards 2016

The highly successful second edition of the VCLA International Student Awards was concluded on April 16, 2016, with the celebration of two winners. The winners of the 2015 edition of the VCLA International Student Awards are:

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

• Felix Dörre (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) for his thesis “Verification of Random Number Generators”

Outstanding Master Thesis Award

• Valeria Vignudelli (University of Bologna), for her thesis “The Discriminating Power of Higher-Order Languages: A Process Algebraic Approach” (Bologna)

Honorable Mention

• Maximilian Schleich (Oxford University) for the work “Learning Regression Models over Factorised Joins”

Details and photo gallery here

The first edition of the VCLA International Student Awards 2015

The VCLA announced the first edition of the VCLA International Student Awards in the course of the largest event in the history of logic taking place in Vienna, in the Summer of 2014. The Vienna Summer of Logic (VSL) consisted of twelve large conferences and numerous workshops, attracting over 2000 researchers from all over the world.

The highly successful first edition of the VCLA International Student Awards was concluded on Friday, May 15, 2015, with the celebration of four winners in two award categories. The winners of the 2014 edition of the VCLA International Student Awards are:

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

• Pablo Muñoz, University of Chile, New Complexity Bounds for Evaluating CRPQs with Path Comparisons

Outstanding Master Thesis Award

• Kuldeep S. Meel, Rice University, Sampling Techniques for Boolean Satisfiability
• Luke Schaeffer, University of Waterloo, Deciding Properties of Automatic Sequences
• Sophie Spirkl, University of Bonn, Boolean Circuit Optimization

Details and the photo gallery here