The Carinthian regional government has once again honored outstanding scientific work in the field of digitalization. The Department for Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity is delighted to receive two award-winning theses at once.

Dr. techn. DI Jasmin Wachter, BA BSc was awarded the 2025 Digitalization Scholarship, endowed with €1,600, for her dissertation “A utility-based approach to security in robotics”. In her PhD thesis in computer science, she investigates economic and technical incentives for increased security in complex cyber-physical systems: She develops game-theoretic models for analyzing network security and presents, among other things, an optimization-based approach for efficient network hardening under budget constraints.

Veronika Semmelrock, MSc BSc, was also recognized for her master’s thesis “Investigating the grounding bottleneck for a large-scale configuration problem”. In her work, she analyzes scalability issues in Answer Set Programming and demonstrates how her newly developed “constraint-aware guessing” approach significantly reduces the memory requirements of large AI configuration problems.

Both works make an important contribution to Carinthia’s digital future and underscore the excellent research quality at the AICS department.