Four young researchers were honored on Thursday, December 4, 2025 at the University of Salzburg for their outstanding dissertations. Dr. Tijn De Vos was awarded for his work “Graph Sparsification in Distributed and Dynamic Settings”.

A new paper titled “Greedy Algorithms for Shortcut Sets and Hopsets” has been published on arXiv. The authors are Ben Bals, Joakim Blikstad, Greg Bodwin, Daniel Dadush, Sebastian Forster, and Yasamin Nazari.

The talk focused on recent advancements in extending classical dimension reduction techniques such as the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma and Multidimensional Scaling to more general settings beyond Euclidean geometry. Chengyuan Deng presented new results addressing symmetric and reflexive dissimilarity measures, including non-metric cases, and discussed open research directions in this emerging area.