December 19, 2025

Antonis Skarlatos Successfully Defends PhD at University of Salzburg

On December 16, 2025, Antonis Skarlatos successfully defended his dissertation,

under supervision of Univ.-Prof. Sebastian Forster at the department of Computer Science, University of Salzburg. His dissertation is titled “Dynamic k-Clustering and Shortest Paths”.

We warmly congratulate Dr. Skarlatos on this achievement!

Foto: © privat

December 17, 2025

Daniel Schmitt honored with the Young Investigators Award of the University of Salzburg

On the Day of Teaching, at the end of November 2025, Dipl.-Ing. BSc Daniel Ulrich Schmitt, one of our Ph.D. students, was honored with the University of Salzburg’s Young Investigators Award.

With this award, the University recognizes outstanding dissertation projects and sends a strong signal in support of emerging scholars and researchers.

The prize is awarded in six categories. These categories correspond to the six faculties and thus cover the broad spectrum of research at the University of Salzburg. From a total of 35 submissions, the juries selected first-, second-, and third-place winners in each thematic group.

December 17, 2025

Valedictory Prof. Hagenauer

After the well-deserved retirement of Prof. Hagenauer at the end of October 2025, the Faculty of Digital and Analytical Sciences—and in particular the Department of Computer Science—was very pleased to have the opportunity to listen to Prof. Hagenauer once more, on December 9, during his farewell lecture titled “Pilot Study – Regular Degree Programme – Bachelor/Master: Computer Science at the University of Salzburg in Retrospect.”

In his talk, he outlined the development of Computer Science at the University of Salzburg—from its beginnings within the Institute of Mathematics under the leadership of Prof. Zinterhof, through the pilot study program launched in 1988, the establishment of the regular degree program in 1995, and the subsequent introduction of both the doctoral program and the teacher training program “Computer Science and Computer Science Management” in 1998.

December 5, 2025

Dissertation prizes awarded for excellent research

Four young researchers were honored yesterday at the University of Salzburg for their outstanding dissertations. The University of Salzburg awarded this year’s dissertation prizes for excellent research in the “Stuba Academica.”

Four outstanding dissertations in the fields of natural sciences and social science were honored at a festive ceremony on Thursday, December 4, 2025.

The dissertation awards are presented annually by the “Verein Forschungsforum” , which supports young scientists and highlights their exceptional achievements. The university management offered their personal congratulations: Vice-Rector for Education and Student Experience Michaela Rückl, Eva Jonas (Dean of the Faculty of Natural and Life Sciences), Ricarda Drüeke (Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences), and Sebastian Forster (Vice Dean of the Faculty of Digital and Analytical Sciences) were in attendance.

November 17, 2025

Talk: Willi Mann and Stefan de Lorenzo

On November 04, 2025, we had the pleasure to host a talk from Willi Mann and Stefan de Lorenzo on the Celonis Process Query Language (PQL) at the Department of Computer Science.

PQL is a powerful and intuitive data query language designed specifically for business users.

Together with the audience, Willi Mann and Stefan de Lorenzo explored PQL’s core data model with tables and a cycle-free join graph, PQL’s “column-oriented” language structure to simplify data retrieval and knowledge management, and filter-related key features like decoupled filtering, late filter application, and composability. Afterwards, Willi Mann and Stefan de Lorenzo gave an outline of the implementation and the underlying architecture, including an efficient software-level caching mechanism, and concluded with an outlook on PQL’s evolution to nativ OCDM query support. Finally, Willi Mann and Stefan de Lorenzo engaged in intensive discussions with the audience to clarify open questions.

November 14, 2025

Congratulations to Manuel Widmoser on successfully defending his dissertation

On October 31, 2025, Manuel Widmoser successfully defended his cumulative Ph.D. thesis “Scaling Similarity Queries to Massive Datasets”.

Thereby, Mr. Widmoser completed his doctoral studies and received the title “Dr. techn.” (equiv. Ph.D.).

Over the last four years, Mr. Widmoser diligently worked on multiple similarity query techniques and how to efficiently execute them on very large datasets. As part of his Ph.D. thesis, Mr. Widmoser introduced the following novel techniques: (1) A robust similarity join algorithm that leverages metric properties to provide fast runtimes and low memory consumption over a wide range of different dataset characteristics. (2) The first design for distributed inverted list index under memory disaggregation (the current architectural trend for large data centers). Ultimately, this enables efficient similarity query processing in a distributed setting, i.e., if the index no longer fits into the main memory of a single machine. (3) The first graph-preserving design of the Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW) index under memory disaggregation that scales beyond billions of vectors while retaining near in-memory performance and high accuracy.