High-ranking awards for dissertation

Dominik Schreiber at the presentation of the Fahiem-Bacchus Award (left) and the GI Dissertation Prize (right)

The dissertation, which was written at the Chair of Algorithm Engineering at the KIT Faculty of Computer Science, deals with parallel and distributed solution approaches for the problem of satisfiability (SAT). The aim is to find a consistent solution for a given logical problem or to recognize that no such solution exists. SAT solvers are used in numerous disciplines, for example to systematically analyze important hardware and software components in terms of 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") categories of relevant international competitions since 2020. "The neural network revolution is crucially driven by the use of parallel hardware. Dominik Schreiber's work is an important step in this direction for symbolic artificial intelligence," explains Schreiber's supervisor Professor Peter Sanders, Professor of Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

The dissertation prize of the German Informatics Society (GI) is awarded annually to 1-3 dissertations in computer science written in German-speaking countries - the prize is awarded jointly with the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) and the Swiss Informatics Society (SI). Dominik Schreiber receives this year's dissertation prize together with Prof. Mennatallah El-Assady (ETH Zurich). The award ceremony took place on September 25 as part of the INFORMATIK24 festival in Wiesbaden.
The President of the GI, Christine Regitz, commented: "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."

Dominik Schreiber also received the newly endowed Fahiem-Bacchus Award for his dissertation "Scalable SATSolving and its Application". The Fahiem Bacchus Award honors a dissertation from the years 2022-2023 in the field of propositional satisfiability and related topics 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 was instrumental in advancing research on propositional satisfiability and automated reasoning. "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", says Professor Armin Biere, member of the Fahiem-Bacchus-Award selection committee and computer science professor at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

"I feel very honored to have received the first Fahiem-Bacchus Award. It really encourages me to continue this research and to further advance the scalability of #AutomatedReasoning in #HPC and #Cloud systems," said Dominik Schreiber after the award ceremony.