Markus Hecher finished his PhD in July 2021, where he graduated according to an individual binational agreement between TU Wien (Austria) and the University of Potsdam (Germany).
Besides the EurAI Dissertation Award 2021, he has also received the National PhD Award of Excellence 2021 by BMBWF Austria, the Best Student Paper Award at KR 2020 and the Best Student Award and Best Paper Award at ICLP 2021.

In his thesis, Markus developed algorithms for treewidth for efficiently evaluating logical formulas, thereby trading a decrease of structural dependency for an increase of solving effort (and vice versa). He developed a novel toolkit for treewidth-based lower bounds for many problems in AI, where he solved a question that has been open for more than a decade. With the help of this toolkit, he proved that a significant improvement of a whole list of treewidth-based algorithms in AI is very unlikely.

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