The algorithms section had three papers at the European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), the European top conference on algorithms, which took place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The papers were A Parameterized Algorithm for Vertex Connectivity Survivable Network Design Problem with Uniform Demands (Jørgen Bang-Jensen, Kristine Vitting Klinkby, Pranabendu Misra, Saket Saurabh), Improved Approximation Algorithms for the Expanding Search Problem (Svenja Griesbach, Felix Hommelsheim, Max Klimm, Kevin Schewior), and Threshold Testing and Semi-Online Prophet Inequalities (Martin Hoefer, Kevin Schewior). Kevin Schewior attended the conference and gave the talk on prophet inequalities.

As of today, Kim Skak Larsen takes over as Head of the Algorithms Section from Daniel Merkle. As part of that, Kim enters the department's management group. Kim has expressed his gratitude towards Daniel for taking care of the group during the last three years. Daniel is moving to a new position at Bielefeld University, but fortunately stays associated with IMADA, and will still take full part in the exciting research projects the cheminformatics group are running. Kim is not new to managerial tasks, having been head of section before as well as head of department some years back. He is looking forward to working with and for this wonderful group of excellent researchers!

Joan Boyar was an invited speaker at this year's MFCS - the 48th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, held at the INP in Bordeaux, France. Joan introduced the audience to Online Algorithms with Predictions, a topic she has recently and naturally progressed into after her succesful endeavors in advice complexity.

Magnus Berg gave his first conference talk at the 18th Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium (WADS), which was held at Concordia University in Montreal. There were several interested researchers asking questions following the talk and many positive remarks later during the conference. The talk was based on the accepted paper, Online Minimum Spanning Trees with Weight Predictions, presenting joint work with Joan Boyar, Lene M. Favrholdt, and Kim S. Larsen.

Simon Erfurth gave his first conference talk at the Joint Computation+Journalism Symposium and European Data & Computational Journalism Conference at ETH in Zürich. The title of the contribution was Adding Quotable Signatures to the Transparency Repertoire in Data Journalism, representing joint work between Simon and Marília Gehrke, now at the University of Groningen. As someone educated in pure math, attending and interacting with people in such an inter-disciplinary environment is an interesting experience, Simon says.

During the month of May, Joan Boyar and Kim Skak Larsen visited the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. While there, they both gave talks on some of their recent work on online algorithms with predictions, dealing with scheduling and paging, to be presented at WADS and ICML this summer. At the University of Toronto, they worked with Faith Ellen and Allan Borodin. In addition, Shahin Kamali came in from York University and Denis Pankratov came in from Concordia University to collaborate on new projects. It will be a challenge to find the time to make progress on the many new research projects when teaching starts!

ARCO, an acronym for Algorithmic Research Cooperation around Øresund, is a network for promoting collaboration in research within algorithms around the Øresund Region. This time, the ARCO meeting was held at KU and attended by Magnus Berg, Joan Boyar, Lene Favrholdt, and Kim Skak Larsen. Magnus gave his first talk as a Ph.D. student on Online Minimum Spanning Trees with Weight Predictions, a result which is also to be presented at the 18th International Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium (WADS). His presentation generated a lot of interest, the most follow-up questions of any of the presentations, and many of our colleagues complimented Magnus afterwards for his nice talk.

Kevin Schewior attended the Dagstuhl Seminar on Scheduling, organized by Nicole Megow (Bremen), Benjamin Moseley (CMU), David Shmoys (Cornell), Ola Svensson (EPFL), and Sergei Vassilvitskii (Google). About 50 researchers participated, among them a lot of big names from the scheduling community. This edition of the seminar series had a special focus on beyond-the-worst-case algorithm design and approaches that incorporate learning. Kevin gave a short talk on Evaluating Stochastic Score functions.

ARCO, an acronym for Algorithmic Research Cooperation around Øresund, is a network for promoting collaboration in research within algorithms around the Øresund Region. This time, the ARCO meeting was held at ITU and attended by Kim Skak Larsen, Joan Boyar, Kevin Schewior, Simon Skjernaa Erfurth, Magnus Berg, and Rolf Fagerberg. Kevin gave a talk on The Itinerant List Update Problem.

Joan Boyar and Kim Skak Larsen joined the 24-hour DDC meeting at Storebælt Sinatur Hotel & Konference, together with their Ph.D. student, Simon Skjernaa Erfurth. We enjoyed an informative meeting, updating us on the status of the various projects, while time was also reserved for discussions on how the Digital Democracy Center could develop.

The Teaching Prize at SDU is awarded once a year to one person. Given that SDU has a few thousand employees, getting the award is quite an achievement! Lene receives the prize for her special ability to make very complex material understandable. The prize is in recognition of her didactic approach, described by the students as elegant, intuitive, attentive, accommodating, and entertaining. Lene is in the middle with the Dean of the Faculty of Science on the left and the Vice-Chancellor on the right.

Computer scientists from all over Denmark met for the second DIREC meeting at Helnan Hotel Marselis in Aarhus. As last time, the meeting included an excellent algorithms session, and this time Kevin Schewior gave a talk on Recent Advances in I.I.D. Prophet Inequalities. From our algorithms group, Kim Skak Larsen, Joan Boyar, Jakob Lykke Andersen, and Rolf Fagerberg also attended the meeting.

Kevin Schewior attended the Workshop on Approximation and Online Algorithms (WAOA) 2022. The workshop was part of ALGO 2022 in Potsdam, Germany, which had about 400 participants and several keynote speakers. Kevin gave a talk on Knapsack Secretary Through Boosting, a paper with his former Master's student Moritz Stinzendörfer (now TU Kaiserslautern), Andreas Abels (RWTH Aachen), and Leon Ladewig (formerly TU Munich), and chaired one of the sessions.

We are excited to welcome Casper Asbjørn Eriksen and Sissel Banke into our group as Ph.D. students. Both Casper and Sissel are CS MS graduates from our department and they will be working on Algorithmic Cheminformatics with their advisors, Jakob L. Andersen, Rolf Fagerberg, and Daniel Merkle.

We are excited to welcome Magnus Berg into our group as a Ph.D. student. He comes with an MS in mathematics and a side topic in computer science. Magnus will work on the project Online Algorithms with Predictions, as part of the national undertaking of Digital Research Centre Denmark (DIREC), under the Innovation Fund Denmark. The project is carried out in collaboration with ITU. As the main advisor, Kim Skak Larsen is joint by Lene Favrholdt and Melih Kandemir. Joan Boyar will also function as an advisor for the online part on equal terms with Kim and Lene, while Nutan Limaye from ITU and Melih will advise on connections to machine learning from different points of view.

Florian Hoersch is visiting the department this week from the Technische Universität Ilmenau, where also a former member of the group, Matthias Kriesell, is located. Hoersch's received his Ph.D. from the University of Grenoble in September 2021. His thesis contains a number of impressive results on graph connectivity and orientations of graphs. He will give a talk in the Computer Science colloquium series.

Yubao Guo from RWTH Aachen is visiting the department this week. Guo's Ph.D. thesis from 1995 focuses on locally semicomplete digraphs, a class of digraphs dicovered by Bang-Jensen in 1990 and since the topic of more than 100 research papers. Guo has made substantial contributions to the theory of locally semicomplete digraphs as well as semicomplete multipartite digraphs. Guo and Bang-Jensen have a number of joint papers together. Guo will give a talk in the Tuesday colloquium slot.

The Faculty of Science Teaching Prize is awarded each year to one employee who has excelled at motivational and committed teaching of the highest quality. In accordance with tradition, Lene Monrad Favrholdt was nominated by her students. Students say Lene is one of the best educators they have met, with an ability to make complex mathematical concepts easy to understand. Teaching math on the first year to students who don't know yet where and why they need it is a special challenge, and Lene is recognized for her enormous effort and focus on the students. During corona times, she made an extra effort of giving on-site lectures while arranging that students forced to stay home could also both follow and ask questions on-line. Lene is second from the left and the dean is speaking.

Rob van Stee from the University of Siegen visits the online algorithms group for a week. Rob is a friend of the department who has visited several times over the years, starting as a Ph.D. student. He has also served on thesis assessment committees for the department etc. Rob will give a talk in the Tuesday colloquium slot.

Bang-Jensen gave the talk Making a tournament k-strong by adding new arcs. This is based on joint work with Anders Yeo and former student Kasper Skov Johansen, now a research assistant at DTU Compute, starting his PhD studies there in the fall. At ICGT, Bang-Jensen also chaired the opening plenary talk by Reinhard Diestel.

While in Montpellier, Bang-Jensen visited his research collaborator, Stephane Bessy, at LIRMM Université Montpellier. They continued their long-term collaboration on the structure of directed graphs.

Lene Favrholdt, Joan Boyar, and Kim Skak Larsen attended SWAT 2022 - 18th Scandinavian Symposium and Workshops on Algorithm Theory, for the first time held physically in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands. Lene presented our joint paper, Joan chaired one of the sessions, and Kim leaned back and enjoyed the performances. ツ

Lene Favrholdt gave a keynote address on Paging and Packing with Possibly Precise Predictions at the 15th Workshop on Models and Algorithms for Planning and Scheduling (MAPSP) at the Oropa Sanctuary in Italy. At the same workshop, Kevin Schewior gave a contributed talk on The High-Dimensional Cow-Path Problem.

The chair of the program committee was Leah Epstein (U Haifa). The other keynote speakers were Alessandro Agnetis (U Siena), Thomas Erlebach (U Durham), and Alberto Marchetti-Spaccamela (La Sapienza). In total, there were more than 100 participants. MAPSP is known for a large number of high-quality talks but also its openness and the allotted time for discussions, e.g., during the social event, which in this case was a hike through meadows with cows to a mountain lake. Kirk Pruhs (U Pittsburgh) maintains a website on the history of the workshop.

We welcome Akbar Davoodi and Mehmet Aziz Yirik who join the Cheminformatics Group to work on the MATOMIC project. Akbar comes from a postdoc position at the Czech Academy of Sciences and Aziz finished his Ph.D. recently from the Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena.

The MATOMIC project - Mathematical Modelling for Microbial Community Induced Metabolic Diseases - is launched through kick-off meetings at the National Institute of Public Health in Copenhagen today, and at SDU tomorrow. This internationally-based center is funded by the Challenge Programme of the Novo Nordisk Foundation and is headed by our Cheminformatics group: Daniel Merkle, flanked by Jakob Lykke Andersen and Rolf Fagerberg.

Kevin Schewior was invited to and attended the Workshop on New Challenges in Scheduling Theory in Aussois, France. The program committee consisted of Jacek Blazewicz (TU Poznan), Michael Bender (Stony Brook), Erwin Pesch (U Siegen), Kirk Pruhs (U Pittsburgh), Denis Trystam (Grenoble INP), and Guochan Zhang (Zhejiang U). The workshop had about 80 participants. A few of them attended online, but the vast majority attended on site. There were about 50 talks on the theory and practice of scheduling, many of which triggered refreshing in-person discussions during the ample time left free aside of the talks and during the cheese fondue. Kevin gave a talk about his recent work on Stochastic Probing with Increasing Precision.

Joan Boyar Lene Favrholdt, and Kim Skak Larsen were invited to the Workshop on Algorithms with Predictions, held at the Bernoulli Center for Fundamental Studies at EPFL in picturesque Lausanne, Switzerland. Joan and Lene gave a well-received invited talk together surveying Online Algorithms with Advice, and Kim was on the panel, together with Sid Banerjee (Cornell), Daniel Dadush (CWI), Anupam Gupta (Carnegie Mellon), and Seffi Naor (Technion), to discuss the current issues and priorities in this developing area. The workshop was very enjoyable with good talks and lots of time for networking and initiating research collaboration.

We are excited to welcome Kevin Schewior as assistant professor in the algorithms group. Kevin is interested in uncertainty, approximation algorithms, and algorithmic problems more generally. Kevin got his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Mathematics of Technische Universität Berlin in 2016. He has held postdoc positions in Germany but also in Santiago and Paris. We look forward to working with Kevin!

From our online algorithms group, Joan Boyar and Kim Skak Larsen joined the DDC meeting at Nyborg Strand Hotel, together with their Ph.D. student, Simon Skjernaa Erfurth. We enjoyed a well-planned and fruitful meeting, discussing the challenges that the Digital Democracy Center should undertake and the progress that has been made so far. The format of this 24 hour meeting, going from lunch to lunch, gave us the possibility of also interacting on a more social level in the evening, getting to know each other better.

We are excited to welcome Simon Erfurth into our group as a Ph.D. student. Simon comes with an MS in mathematics with a master's project in cryptology. He will work on the inter-disciplinary project, Trust and News Authenticity, as part of the Digital Democracy Center (DDC). Due to the inter-disciplinary nature of the project, Simon has several advisors, Claes de Vreese, who is the head of DDC, and Joan Boyar, Kim Skak Larsen, and Ruben Niederhagen from IMADA.