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

Fabian Klute successfully defended his PhD thesis “Avoiding Crossings in Non-Planar Graph Layouts” on March 13, 2020. Congratulations!

Fabian was supervised by Martin Nöllenburg. His thesis reviewers were Fabrizio Frati and Stephen Kobourov. Fabian is now a postdoc at Utrecht University.

Soeren Nickel, who recently joined the Algorithms and Complexity Group as a PhD student, won the Distinguished Young Alumn Award at the 29th EPILOG event of the Faculty of Informatics. With this award the Faculty of Informatics honors Soeren’s outstanding Master thesis “Generating Stable Demers and Iso-Hexagon Cartograms” as well as his excellent EPILOG presentation.

Soeren’s thesis, supervised by Martin Nöllenburg, presents algorithms and complexity results for computing value-by-area square and hexagon cartograms to display spatiotemporal data as a highly abstract map. It has already been presented at the International Symposium

Two submissions of graph layouts from the Algorithms and Complexity Group were successful in the 26th Graph Drawing Contest, which was held in conjunction with the 27th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD) in Průhonice near Prague in September 2019.

PhD students Guangping Li, Soeren Nickel and their advisor Martin Nöllenburg from the Algorithms and Complexity Group together with their colleagues Hsiang-Yun Wu and Ivan Viola from the Visualization Group of TU Wien won the First Prize in the category “Creative Topics: Meal Ingredients”. In this category the

This semester’s EPILOG event, at which the Faculty of Informatics presents and honors excellent students and their Master theses, was a successful one for two Master students who wrote their thesis in the Algorithms and Complexity group.

Raphael Löffler received one of the two Best Poster Awards for the poster on his thesis “An Interactive Optimization Framework for Point Feature Label Placement”, supervised by Martin Nöllenburg and Fabian Klute. Among a competition of over 100 posters, Raphael convinced the EPILOG jury with his poster design and the clarity of exposition.

Raphael

Two teams of TU Wien students from the Master’s course “Graph Drawing Algorithms” taught by Martin Nöllenburg and Fabian Klute received awards for their submissions to the 25th Graph Drawing Contest, which was held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD) in Barcelona in September 2018.

In the category “Creative Topics: Game of Thrones” the task was to create a layout of a network of 84 characters and their relations from the popular TV show “Game of Thrones”. From a strong competition of 18 submissions the

Martin Nöllenburg and Therese Biedl (U Waterloo) have been elected as two new members of the steering committee of the International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD) by the GD community. They will serve for a three-year term until 2020. Martin was already an elected member of the steering committee in the previous period 2015-2017.

Three researchers of the Algorithms and Complexity group returned from the International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD) 2017 in Boston winning several awards.

Theresa Fröschl, Master student in the Algorithms and Complexity group, received a “Konferenzschnuppern” travel grant for female Master students from the Faculty of Informatics to join her advisor Martin Nöllenburg on the conference trip to Boston. They received the Best Poster Award for their joint poster on Minimizing Wiggles in Storyline Visualizations, which is based on Theresa’s ongoing Master’s thesis.

Moreover, Theresa together with her teammates Jonathan

Fabian Klute received the first prize in one of the four categories of the Graph Drawing Contest 2016 for his submission “Circles of Panama”, which shows the complex network of offshore companies revealed through the recent “Panama Papers” leak. The contest took place during the 24th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization in Athens, Greece, which was held September 19-21, 2016.

Congratulations!