News articles

First Alumnus of the Vienna PhD School of Informatics

Last week Stefan Rümmele defended his PhD thesis "The Parameterized Complexity of Nonmonotonic Reasoning" in front of an international jury. He finished his studies as the first alumnus of the Vienna PhD School of Informatics with distinction.

The research of Stefan Rümmele deals with the problem of solving efficiently fragments of provable intractable computational problems. Thereby the focus is on problems of nonmonotonic reasoning, a subarea of artificial intelligence.

Stefan Rümmele finished his Master of Science in Computational Intelligence at TU Vienna (2008), and he also received the Distinguished Young Alumnus Award of the Faculty of Informatics. This award is given to the best diploma thesis. Since 2009 he worked as project assistant at the research group for <link http: www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at _blank link_intern>Databases and Artificial Intelligence (DBAI) at the Institute of Information Systems. The same year he was accepted at the Vienna PhD School of Informatics. The jury of his defense was formed by Francesco Scarcello (Università della Calabria, Italy), Gerhard Brewka (University of Leipzig, Germany), and Reinhard Pichler (Advisor and head of DBAI), chaired by Hannes Werthner (director of the Vienna PhD School of Informatics).

The PhD School’s curriculum covers the main research areas of the Faculty of Informatics, and it is a three-year full-time program with scholarship. The program consists of fundamental and area courses which are held in English. At the moment the PhD school has 40 students, where each year a maximum of 15 PhD students is accepted. In 2012 the school had nearly 500 applications world-wide.

For more information:

  • <link http: www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at staff ruemmele>www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/staff/ruemmele
  • <link http: www.informatik.tuwien.ac.at teaching phdschool>www.informatik.tuwien.ac.at/teaching/phdschool