Dissertation received award

Dominik Schreiber receives two awards for his dissertation "Scalable SAT Solving and its Application": the joint dissertation award from the German Informatics Society, the Austrian Computer Society, and the Swiss Informatics Society; and the Fahiem Bacchus PhD Award in Satisfiability.

The dissertation, which was written at the chair of Prof. Sanders, addresses parallel and distributed approaches to solving instances of the propositional satisfiability (SAT) problem. The goal is to find a consistent solution for a given logical problem or to recognize that no such solution exists. SAT solvers have practical applications in numerous disciplines, such as the systematic analysis of important hardware and software components regarding their correctness and security. The massively parallel approaches from Dominik Schreiber's dissertation have established themselves as the state of the art for scalable SAT solving and have dominated the corresponding ("cloud") tracks of relevant international competitions since 2020.

The dissertation award from the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik, GI) annually honors 1-3 dissertations in computer science that have been produced in the German-speaking region. The award is presented jointly with the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) and the Swiss Informatics Society (SI). Dominik Schreiber receives this year’s dissertation award together with Prof. Mennatallah El-Assady (ETH Zurich). The award ceremony will take place at the end of September as part of the INFORMATIK24 festival in Wiesbaden.
Christine Regitz, President of the GI, comments: "Dr. Schreiber’s dissertation impressively demonstrates how theoretical computer science can solve practical problems. His research not only provides new algorithmic approaches but also highly scalable implementations that achieve significant improvements in practice." (translated from German; see GI announcement)

The Fahiem Bacchus Award 2024 honors a dissertation from the years 2022-2023 in the field of propositional satisfiability and related areas on an international level. It was awarded on August 24 at the International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing in Pune, India. The award is named after Fahiem Bacchus (1957-2022), who significantly advanced research in propositional satisfiability and automated reasoning.

Prof. Armin Biere, member of the Fahiem Bacchus Award selection committee, comments: "This outstanding thesis presents the state-of-the-art of parallelizing the most important NP-hard problem, i.e., propositional SAT solving. [...] The thesis work already produced exceptional impact in a highly visible field both on the academic as well as industrial side."