The 31st edition of the International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization in Palermo, Italy, ended on September 22, 2023, with a large number of awards and prizes for members and students of the Algorithms and Complexity Group.

We congratulate Markus Wallinger and his co-authors Felix Klesen, Jacob Miller, Fabrizio Montecchiani, and Martin Nöllenburg for the best poster award 2023 on their poster "What happens at Dagstuhl? Uncovering Patterns through Visualization".

Markus Chimani (PC co-chair), Jacob Miller, Felix Klesen, Martin Nöllenburg, Markus Wallinger, Fabrizio Montecchiani, and Michalis Bekos (PC co-chair).

Furthermore, the annual Graph Drawing Contest honored multiple contributions in the following categories:

• Creative Topic: Board game recommendation graph. 15 international teams submitted their best visualizations of the BoardGameGeek Top-40 (or Top-100) graph, in which each game is a vertex and two games are linked by an edge if players of the first game also like to play the other. The contest committee selected the best contributions based on both their aesthetic and design aspects, as well as their data readability and clarity of the graph structure.
  • Our student team Christoph Kern, Manuel Oberbacher and Horst Zahradnik won the first prize for their submission "Journey through the board game universe", which they prepared in the course Graph Drawing Algorithms.
  • Our student team Florentina Voboril, Felicia Schmidt and Viktoria Pogrzebacz won the third prize for their submission "Find your next favorite board game", also prepared as part of the coursework of Graph Drawing Algorithms.

The winning poster Journey through the board game universe created by Christoph Kern, Manuel Oberbacher and Horst Zahradnik.	The third place poster Find your next favorite board game by Florentina Voboril, Felicia Schmidt and Viktoria Pogrzebacz.

• Live Challenge: Crossing-Minimal Point-Set Embedding. In both a manual and an automatic category, teams had to embed a given graph with straight edges on a pre-specified point set while minimizing the resulting edge crossings. In total 19 teams participated in the manual challenge and 7 in the automatic one, where they could use their own software to optimize the given instances.
  • Our student team Saman Miran, Jakub Nawrocki, Hesham Morgan won the second prize in the automatic category with a crossing minimization software developed in the course Graph Drawing Algorithms.
  • The first-prize winner of the manual category included our student Florentina Voboril, together with Tim Hegemann and Johannes Zink from the University of Würzburg.
  • The second prize in the manual category went to Robert Ganian and Martin Nöllenburg, together with their colleague Maarten Löffler (Utrecht University).
  • The third prize in the manual category went to Alexander Dobler and Jules Wulms.

Live challenge winning team Hebonk. Fabian Klute (contest co-chair), Tim Hegemann, Johannes Zink, Florentina Voboril, Emilio Di Giacomo (conference co-chair).	Live challenge second place team RoMaMa. Fabian Klute (contest co-chair), Martin Nöllenburg, Maarten Löffler, Robert Ganian, Emilio Di Giacomo (conference co-chair).

Congratulations to all our successful students and team members!