This year’s winner of the Best Master Thesis Award is Alexander Beiser with his thesis Novel techniques for circumventing the ASP Bottleneck. He was supervised by Stefan Woltran and Markus Hecher, who currently holds a research position at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France. Markus Hecher introduced Alexander to the audience, praising his excellence and unwavering dedication. He also highlighted how truly rewarding it is to collaborate with someone so driven and inspiring.

Alexander’s thesis advances solutions to the grounding bottleneck in Answer Set Programming, a slowdown that occurs when abstract rules are expanded into large concrete programs. His work improves body-decoupled grounding by making it compatible with traditional grounding methods and by extending it to handle a wider range of rule types. He introduces both manual and automated ways to decide how to combine these grounding approaches based on the structure of the rules and data. Along with new methods that reduce grounding size and shift some work to the solving phase, his algorithms significantly improve efficiency, especially on grounding-heavy problems.

More information can be found at the Informatics Awards 2025.