News from the research group Knowledge-Based Systems of February 4, 2023

Philipp Hanisch Receives Georg Helm Prize

Each year, the Association for the Promotion of Students at Technische Universität Dresden (Verein zur Förderung von Studierenden der Technischen Universität Dresden) recognizes the most outstanding academic works written by students at TU Dresden with the Georg Helm Prize. Each Faculty and Central Academic Unit at TU Dresden may nominate one dissertation and one Diplom thesis or comparable academic work (master’s thesis, State Examination). Among the submitted theses, the prize jury, which consists of representatives of the Association for the Promotion of Students at Technische Universität Dresden, the Rector and other representatives of the University Executive Board, selects the best three or four theses.

During the award ceremony on 04.02.2023, Philipp Hanisch received the Georg Helm Prize 2022 for his Diploma thesis “Indexing for Datalog Materialisation with Leapfrog Triejoin”. The thesis formalizes, discusses, and evaluates challenges and potential solutions of the development of a Datalog system based on the so-called leapfrog triejoin algorithm. In contrast to “traditional” join algorithm, leapfrog triejoin is a multiway join that considers, based on a variable order, all atoms of a Datalog rule with the same variable at the same time. The main focus of the thesis is the indexing of both the given and derived facts, i.e., the way in which these facts should be stored to enable an efficient computation of all derived facts. Thus, the thesis is an important piece for the Datalog system which is under development by the research group for Knowledge-Based Systems.

With the award, Philipp Hanisch joins the Georg Helm Prize winners at ICCL, which already feature the supervisors of the thesis Markus Krötzsch and Anni-Yasmin Turhan. Even though the thesis marks the end of Philipp Hanisch’s studies of computer science and his time as student assistant at ICCL, it is not the end of the collaboration: Philipp Hanisch returned as PhD student and scientific coordinator of SECAI last September.