Stefan Szeider

Professor Head of the Algorithms and Complexity Group Faculty of Informatics Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien)

Favoritenstraße 9–11, E192-01 1040 Vienna, Austria Room HC0401 Phone: +43(1)58801–192100 sz@ac.tuwien.ac.at Twitter Biography

Academic Affiliations. I am a full professor and chair at TU Wien, Vienna, Austria, and head of the Algorithms and Complexity Group, and I am a visiting scientist at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley. Previously I held academic positions at the University of Durham (UK), the University of Toronto (Can), and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (AT).

Academic Activities.  I am a founding co-chair of the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms (VCLA),  the chair of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND  doctoral programme logicCS@TUWien, a key researcher of the Cluster of Excellence Bilateral AI, a full member of the Wolfgang Pauli Institute, a board member of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML), the scientific co-organizer of the Vienna Gödel Lectures, and the chair of the jury for the Heinz Zemanek Dissertation Price of the Austrian Computer Society. I am the speaker of the full professors in Computer Science at TU Wien. Previously, I was the deputy speaker of the Doctoral Program Logical Methods in Computer Science (LogiCS),  and coordinator of the research focus Logic and Computation at the Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien.

Research. In my research, I combine algorithmic and logic-based methods to solve hard computational problems that arise in Artificial Intelligence, Automated Reasoning, and Combinatorial Optimiziation. The design of efficient algorithms is complemented by complexity-theoretic methods for establishing theoretical limits and lower bounds. I have been the principal investigator of several research projects, including projects from the ERC (EU), the EPSRC (UK), the Nuffield Foundation (UK), the FWF (Austria), and the WWTF (Austria). My Erdős Number is 2, and I have published over 200 articles in scientific journals and conference proceedings.

Publications. A list of my publications can be found here.

Editorial. I am an Associate Editor of  the Journal of Computer and System Sciences (JCSS) and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). Previously, I have served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Discrete Algorithms (2014—2018),  Fundamenta Informaticae (2012—2018), and I was a guest editor of Algorithmica (2015) and Discrete Applied Mathematics (2022). I have co-edited the Proceedings of MFCS 2022, IPEC 2013, COMMA 2012, and SAT 2010.

Public Outreach. I'm engaged in dissemination activities of Computer Science to children and interested people;  I am a founding member of the initiative ADA (Algorithms Think Differently), curator of the world record human sorting network,  and the initiator of the video competition Algorithms in 60 Seconds. In 2021, I gave a lecture on Algorithms to the Austrian Parlament. I have created a contemporary version of the Garey-Johnson Cartoon and an OBDD representation of the US presidential election 2020 and 2024. Recently I co-authored a survey article in the Communications of the ACM, that was downloaded over 45000 times. Here is some recent media coverage.

Awards and Prizes. I received a Highlighted Paper Award at SAT 2023 (with Katalin Fazekas, Aina Niemetz, Mathias Preiner, Markus Kirchweger,  and Armin Biere), a Best Paper Award at CP 2020 (with Tomas Peitl), and a first prize in the PACE 2019 competition (with Andre Schidler). I was the first Austrian Computer Scientist to receive an award from the European Research Council (ERC Start 2009).

Graduate Students and Postdocs. My current students and postdocs are Markus Kirchweger (PhD),  Tianwei Zhang (PhD), Hai Xia (PhD), Alexis de Colnet (Postdoc), Andre Schidler (PhD 2023, received the Best Dissertation Award 2024, now Postdoc at TU Wien), Vaidyanathan P. R. (PhD 2023, now Postdoc),  Leroy Chew (postdoc),  Tomas Peitl (PhD 2019, now Postdoc), and Jan Dreier (Postdoc). Former Postdocs were Robert Ganian (now Prof. at TU Wien), Sebastian Ordyniak (now Prof. at U Leeds), Simone Bova, Ramanujan Sridharan (now Prof. at U Warwick), Serge Gaspers (now Prof. at UNSW), Neeldhara Misra (now Prof. at IIT Gandhinaga), and Marko Samer. My former graduate students were Neha Lodha (PhD 2019, Best Student paper at SAT 2016, now Mondi Group), Eduard Eiben (PhD 2018, received Austria's Award of Excellence, now Prof. at RHUL, U London),  Ronald de Haan (PhD 2016, received the Beth Dissertation Prize, now Prof. at U Amsterdam), Johannes Fichte (PhD 2015, now Prof . at Linköping U), Friedrich Slivovsky (PhD 2015, now Prof. at U Liverpool), Luke Mathieson (PhD 2010, now Prof at UT Sydney).

Organization of Scientific Events. I co-organized the Dagstuhl Seminar SAT Encodings and Beyond (2023) and the Workshop on Logic-based Methods in Machine Learning, part of FLoC 2022.  I was the general chair and co-organzier of  the 47th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science MFCS 2022),  I co-organized the 9th Workshop on Graph Classes, Optimization, and Width Parameters (GROW 2019), I was the chair of the Congress on Algorithms (ALGO 2017), the Symposium on New Frontiers in Knowledge Compilation (2015), the First Symposium on Structure in Hard Combinatorial Problems (2013), the Third Workshop on Kernelization (2011), and the first Workshop on the Parameterized Complexity of Computational Reasoning (2010).  I was the workshop chair at FLoC 2014, overseeing 74 workshops.

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Excited to participate in the new FWF Cluster of Excellence Bilateral AI as a key researcher.