Today's reception celebrated Professor Jørgen Bang-Jensen who has been employed at the department since 1991, where he started as an associate professor after his assistant professorship at the University of Copenhagen. He has now retired and become a professor emeritus. Jørgen also earned his Ph.D. degree at SDU (when it was Odense University) with Bjarne Toft as his advisor. Jørgen has an impressive publication record with more than 150 articles - primarily in journals, he has advised many succesful Ph.D. and M.S. students, has taught several different theory courses, and is very well-known in graph theory - among many other things for his book with Gregory Gutin on directed graphs. At the reception, the head of department, Martin Svensson, and Bjarne Toft, himself an emeritus here, gave speeches, thanking Jørgen for his service to the department and detailing his many achievements. The graph on the hammer and the table decoration depicts the smallest 2-regular tournament.

Today Simon Erfurth defended his Ph.D. thesis, giving the address Slightly Homomorphic Digital Signatures and Privacy Preserving Folding Schemes. For the last three years Simon has been at IMADA, but has also been associated with the Digital Democracy Center (DDC). Simon was advised by Joan Boyar, Kim Skak Larsen, and Ruben Niederhagen from IMADA, together with Claes de Vreese (head of DDC). Simon's work was assessed by Professor Claudio Orlandi (Aarhus) and Associate Professor Tjerand Silde (Trondheim), together with the local member and chair, Lene Favrholdt. Simon gave a very nice talk, subsequently entering into a mature scientific discussion with the committee about the prospects as well as the limitations of his work. The committee unanimously recommended that Simon be awarded the Ph.D. degree. Congratulations from the Algorithms Section!

We are looking forward to welcoming Aleksandra Olshanova into our group as a Ph.D. student. Her background is in Cheminformatics from the University of Strasbourg. Aleksandra is one of our TACsy Ph.D. students, who spend time at different European universities during their studies. She has been a Ph.D. student on this project since September 15, 2024, but has only now arrived in Odense. Aleksandra's supervisor is Daniel Merkle, but here she'll work with Jakob Lykke Andersen and Rolf Fagerberg on projects in Algorithmic Cheminformatics, as outlined in the TACsy goals. TACsy is an acronym for Training Alliance for Computational Systems Chemistry, which obtained funding as a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Joint Doctoral Network.

The members of the algorithms section, Joan Boyar and Kevin Schewior, are among the five co-organizers of a Ph.D. school on Intersections of Algorithms and Machine Learning Theory to be held at SDU, July 1-4, 2025. The headlines for the four days are the following:

• Paul Duetting (Google Research): Prophet Inequalities
• Roi Livni (Tel Aviv University): Foundations of Machine Learning
• Nicole Megow (University of Bremen): Algorithms with Predictions
• Sahil Singla (Georgia Tech): Data-Driven Stochastic Optimization

More details can be found on the home page for the event.

We are excited to welcome Leo Wennmann into our group as a Ph.D. student. Her background is in Computer Science from the University of Kiel, while most recently she has been at Maastricht University where she developed her interest in algorithmic topics such as approximation algorithms and fine-grained complexity. Leo will work on the project The Twilight Zone of Efficiency: Optimality of Quasi-Polynomial Time Algorithms, funded by the Dutch Research Council, with Lars Rohwedder as her advisor and PI for the project.

We are excited to welcome Teresa Steiner as assistant professor in the algorithms group. Teresa's interests include differential privacy, stringology, and algorithms in general. Teresa got her Ph.D. from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 2022. She has held a postdoc position at the University of Vienna and later at DTU. We look forward to working with Teresa!

Magnus Berg, Rolf Fagerberg, Kim Skak Larsen, and Lars Rohwedder attend ARCO (Algorithmic Research: Cooperation around Oresound) in Malmö. The workshop had 57 participants and a nice and varied program. Lars gave the talk Sensitivity, Proximity and FPT Algorithms for Exact Matroid Problems, Rolf discussed LPS via LCS, and Magnus Online Bin Covering with Frequency Predictions, while Kim was session chair of the final session of the day.

With success rates having been around 10-12% for years, things are never certain, but FNU has granted us another nice travel grant, which they have done continuously for more than 25 years. Kim Skak Larsen, together with Joan Boyar, Lene Favrholdt, and Kevin Schewior are looking forward to working on the many interesting ideas in the project, Trade-Offs for Algorithms Facing Uncertainty.

We are excited to welcome Lars Rohwedder as associate professor in the algorithms group. Lars is interested in approximation algorithms, parameterized algorithms, integer programming, and combinatorial problems in general. Lars got his Ph.D. from the University of Kiel in 2019. He has held a postdoc position at EPFL and a tenured assistant professorship at the School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University. We look forward to working with Lars!

Kevin Schewior attended the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (ISMP), a triennial conference, arguably the most important conference on mathematical optimization. Talks were organized in 35 streams, and there were 19 invited speakers. The conference took place in Montreal, Canada. Kevin gave a talk on Stochastic Function Evaluation, which combined his results published in SIDMA in 2024 (with Benedikt Plank) and in the proceedings of ITCS 2024 (with Lisa Hellerstein and Naifeng Liu).

At the 1st Workshop on Security-Centric Strategies for Combating Information Disorder (SCID), held in conjunction with ACM AsiaCCS 2024 in Singapore, Simon Erfurth presented his latest results on maintaining authenticity under JPEG compressions. His talk, Digital Signatures for Authenticating Compressed JPEG Images, focused on the highlights of his single-authored paper, published as open access. Simon traveled to Singapore as a smaller part of his month-long visit to Academia Sineca in Taiwan.

Kevin Schewior and Lene Favrholdt, together with Marco Chiarandini from another IMADA section, organized the 16th MAPSP - the biennial workshop on models and algorithms for planning and scheduling problems, with Kevin as chair. The workshop was held in wonderful surroundings at Hotel Koldingfjord, June 23 - 28, 2024. Joan Boyar, Lene, and Kevin chaired a session each, and Kim Skak Larsen gave the talk Online Interval Scheduling with Predictions, and Kevin the talk Quickly Determining Who Won an Election. Finally, Magnus Berg gave a 5 min. talk on Online Minimum Spanning Trees with Weight Predictions and Lene one on Online Unit Profit Knapsack with Untrusted Predictions. The workshop was attended by around 100 researchers from all over the world, and the participants enjoyed a daily invited talk and contributed talks in two parallel sessions, but the organizers had also allocated large time slots for collaboration.

Kevin Schewior attended the Lorentz Center workshop on New challenges in search and patrolling games in Leiden, The Netherlands, organized by Spyros Angelopoulos (CNRS - the National Centre for Scientific Research, France), Thomas Lidbetter (Rutgers University), Katerina Papadaki (LSE - the London School of Economics and Political Science), and Florian Wagener (University of Amsterdam). About 25 researchers from the Computer Science and Operation Research community participated. The focus was on problems in which a mobile searcher must locate an adversarial hider within a given environment. Kevin gave a talk on Online search for a hyperplane in high-dimensional Euclidean space.

DTU organized this semester's ARCO (Algorithmic Research: Cooperation around Oresound), but they did so in the historical building of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Magnus Berg, Joan Boyar, Kim Skak Larsen, Jørgen Bang-Jensen, and Bjarne Toft attended, while Lene Favrholdt gave the talk Online Unit Profit Knapsack with Predictions.

Kevin Schewior visited Lisa Hellerstein at the Tandon School of Engineering of New York University for about two months as part of his sabbatical. The visit started right after ITCS 2024, at which a paper co-authored by Lisa and Kevin was presented. In New York, they started several new projects on stochastic Boolean function evaluation, on which they are planning to continue in the next months. Kevin also gave a talk on recent advances in prophet inequalities in the NYU Theory Seminar, held jointly by the Courant Theoretical Computer Science Group and the Tandon Algorithms and Foundations Group.

Today's reception celebrated Professor Joan Boyar who has been employed at the department since 1991. She has now retired and become a professor emerita. Joan started her academic career in the US, graduating with a Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983. Joan has an impressive publication record, she has advised many succesful Ph.D. students, taught lots of different courses, and has many other achievements on her CV. Joan was also the first female associate professor and the first female professor at our department, and the first professor emerita at the entire Faculty of Science at SDU. At the reception, the head of department, Martin Svensson, and one of Joan's former students and now an associate professor at the department, Lene Favrholdt, gave speeches, thanking Joan for her time and service to the department. You can find more information via Joan's home page or read a more personal interview in the feature You Lost to the Girl?!

Together with Kim Skak Larsen, Joan Boyar attended D³A - Danish Digitalization, Data Science and AI 1.0 at Nyborg Strand Hotel & Conference, where she gave the talk Paging with Succinct Predictions. The talk represented joint work with Kim as well as Lene M. Favrholdt, also from SDU, together with other researchers from different locations in Europe. The results had previously been presented at the 2023 ICML. Joan's gave her talk in the Trends in Algorithms Research in Denmark workshop on the first afternoon.

Simon Erfurth presented recent work on image authentication at the Half-day Conference on AI: Innovation, Transformation, and Deterioration, organized by the SDU Cluster on Creativity and Innovation in the Digital Age (CIDA), together with Johanna Eggers, both of whom are affiliated with DDC - the Digital Democracy Centre. Johanna gave the first motivational half of the presentation Securing News Authenticity: A Novel Approach for Combating Misinformation in the Age of Generative AI through Digital Signatures for Images, while Simon followed up in the second half with the more technical part of the contribution. There were many interested people in the audience asking questions, following the very clear but fairly brief presentation. Joan Boyar, one of Simon's advisors, also attended the conference.