David Hammer successfully defended his PhD thesis with results on algorithms and data structures for external memory, efficient simulation of population protocols, and first insights for fragile computing. Congrats, Dr. Hammer!!! The joint PhD project was carried out under the Cotutelle framework between the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and Goethe University Frankfurt.

Together with colleagues at Hamburg University and University of Southern Denmark we coauthored a paper on Simulating Population Protocols in Sub-Constant Time per Interaction which was accepted for presentation at ESA 2020. PDF, Video Presentation.

Ziawasch Abedjan and Ulrich Meyer have been guest-editing a new Special Issue of Algorithms for Big Data appearing soon in it - Information Technology. It contains several articles from reseachers working at the Berlin Big Data Center / BIFOLD and the DFG SPP 1736 Priority Programme on Algorithms for Big Data. Group members Manuel Penschuck and Ulrich Meyer contributed an update on Large-Scale Graph Generation.

The German Research Foundation grants funding for a new research group on Algorithms, Dynamics, and Information Flow in Networks. The group is headed by Martin Hoefer, the participating PIs are Petra Berenbrink (Hamburg), Nils Bertschinger, Amin Coja Oghlan, Ulrich Meyer (all Frankfurt/M), and Tobias Friedrich (HPI/Potsdam). The goals are to advance our understanding of dynamic processes on networks and their relation to efficient algorithms, e.g., in the analysis of spreading processes, distributed network algorithms, network generation models, as well as application domains such as financial markets.

David Veith successfully defended his PhD thesis on graph algorithms for approximate and dynamic settings in the external-memory model. Congrats, Dr. Veith!!! David has moved on to industry and is currently working with Dematic.

Elizaveta Kovalevskaya joined the group as a new PhD student. She will be working in the CMMS project. Welcome, Lisa!

Ulrich Meyer (together with Peter Sanders from KIT) will be awarded the Test-of-Time Award of the European Symposium on Algorithms 2019 (ESA) at ESA 2020.
ESA is the premier European conference on algorithms research. The ESA Test-of-Time Award (ToTA) recognizes excellent papers in algorithms research that were published in the ESA proceedings 19 to 21 years ago which are still influential and stimulating for the field today. For 2019, the Award Committee selected

• Ulrich Meyer, Peter Sanders
  Delta-Stepping: A Parallel Single Source Shortest Path Algorithm.
  Proceedings of ESA 1998, pp. 393-404. Link
  The full version appeared in J. Algorithms 49(1): 114-152 (2003) Link
  

We successfully coorganized and ran the 3rd Indo-German Spring School on Algorithms for Big Data. It took place at IIIT Delhi and SNU during Feb 10th-13 2020.
Information on speakers and programme be found on the webpage of the school. There is also a report with pictures on the webpage of the DFG Office India.

Group member Annamaria Kovacs coauthored a paper on the Nisan-Ronen conjecture for submodular valuations which was accepted for presentation at STOC 2020.
A preliminary version can be found at arXiv.

Group members Manuel Penschuck and Ulrich Meyer coauthored two best papers at ESA 2019:
- On the Fragile Complexity of Comparison-Based Algorithms (Best Paper in Track A)
- On Efficiently Generating Geometric Inhomogeneous and Hyperbolic Random Graphs (Best Paper in Track B)