Alexander Beiser received the Diplomarbeitspreis der Stadt Wien 2025 (master thesis award of the City of Vienna) at an award ceremony held on 28 January 2026 at TU Wien. The prizes - covering both diploma theses and dissertations - are awarded annually to recognize outstanding academic achievements. The awards were presented by Jasmin Gründling-Riener (Vice Rector Academic Affairs) and Katharina Meissner-Schöller (Bereichsleitung für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Wirtschaftsstandort der Magistratsdirektion der Stadt Wien).

The award honors Beiser’s diploma thesis “Novel techniques for circumventing the ASP Bottleneck”, supervised by Stefan Woltran and Markus Hecher. The thesis addresses a central scalability issue in Answer Set Programming (ASP): during grounding, the instantiated program can grow exponentially (“grounding bottleneck”). Beiser’s work proposes four innovations grounded in complexity-theoretic considerations, implements them in a prototype, and validates them via runtime experiments—forming the basis of three peer-reviewed publications.

As a PhD candidate at CAIML, Beiser continues his research on AI methods with a focus on explainable and neuro-symbolic approaches for future air-traffic-management systems (in collaboration with Frequentis).

 
Read more about the award ceremony at the TU Wien News article Große Freude über Auszeichnungen für TUW-Studierende.