TU Wien students excel at the 2020 Graph Drawing Contest

The 27th annual Graph Drawing Contest, held (virtually) in conjunction with the 28th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD) in Vancouver on September 15-18, 2020 was a big success for our TU Wien graph drawing students, winning the first prize in both creative categories, as well as one second prize and one third prize. Three out of these four layouts were created as part of the coursework for the lecture Graph Drawing Algorithms (taught by Martin Nöllenburg and Soeren Nickel).

The 2020 contest comprised two creative topics: the first data set was a small-scale social network of 43 chieftains and farmers and their interactions from the Icelandic Hrafnkel Saga, the second data set a larger relationship network of thousands of artists, bands, and record labels in K-Pop music. Participants were free to design an informative but at the same time aesthetically pleasing layout of these networks.

Hrafnkel Saga

Tamara Drucks, Moritz Leidinger, and Giulio Pace won the first prize with their idea of showing the Hrafnkel Saga as a spiral-shaped storyline layout embedded on a map of Iceland. The second place went to the team of Fabian Jogl, Melanie Paschinger, and Adrian Chmurovic, who used a layered graph layout on concentric half circles to show the actors and events of the saga.


The winning layout by Tamara Drucks, Moritz Leidinger, and Giulio Pace.	The second place layout by Fabian Jogl, Melanie Paschinger, and Adrian Chmurovic.

K-Pop

In the second category, Rupert Ettrich, Julian Haumer, and Samantha Fuchs won the first prize for their Map of K-Pop Stars as a collaboration network of artists and bands grouped by their record labels in the visual style of a celestial chart (or star map). The third place went to Markus Wallinger and Hsiang-Yun Wu who used a matrix of hive plots to highlight several different aspects of the data set.