Markus Hecher

Markus was a postdoc at TU Vienna, Austria. In January 2023 he joined MIT with an FWF Schroedinger project under the supervision of Erik Demaine. His research interests revolve around the graph parameter treewidth and runtime lower bounds as well as complexity analysis involving treewidth. Markus analyzes problems related to Boolean Satisfiability and richer formalisms such as quantified Boolean Formulas, Answer Set Programming, and many more formalisms and problems relevant to Logic, AI, and Databases.

Markus Hecher finished his PhD in July 2021 within an individual binational agreement between TU Wien and the University of Potsdam, supervised by Stefan Woltran and Torsten Schaub. In his thesis, Markus focused on ways to improve solving computationally hard problems. This thesis has been awarded with the EurAI Dissertation Award 2021 (best thesis on AI in Europe in 2021), the GI dissertation award 2021, and the Award of Excellence 2021 by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF). Besides best paper awards, for his contributions to KR and AI so far, he recently received the KR Early Career Award 2021.

Markus passionately participates in competitions, where he contributed to the winning team of the LP/CP Programming Contest 2018 as well as to the winning team of two tracks at the International Competition on Computational Models of Argumentation (ICCMA) 2021.
He actively has helped in the organization of several workshops, competitions and international conferences, e.g., IJCAI 2022.