Matthias Gehnen
E-mail: | gehnen@cs.rwth-aachen.de |
Office: | Room 4105b, Erweiterungsbau E1 of the Computer Science Center (2353|105b) |
Office hours: | Usually Tuesday 12:00-13:00, check this calender to see wheather it takes place |
Phone: | +49-241-80-21132 |
Currently, I am a PhD Student and research assistant in the Theoretical Computer Science group.
Teaching
This summer I organize a seminar on Online Algorithms.
In the past, I worked in various ways for the following courses:
- Algorithmic Battle in Winter 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024,
- Datastructures and Algorithms in Summer 2021 and 2024,
- Decision Theory in Summer 2023,
- Formal systems, automatons and processes in Summer 2022 and 2023,
- Dynamic Algorithms in Summer 2022,
- Certifying Algorithms in Summer 2022,
- Competitive Programming in Teams in Summer 2022 and 2023,
- Proof from the Book in Winter 2021,
- Helping Donald Knuth in Winter 2021,
- Current Topics in Online Algorithms in Summer 2021,
- Complexity Theory in Winter 2020,
- Microeconomics in Summer 2018, 2019 and 2020,
- Analysis for Computer Scientists in Winter 2017.
In particular, I am proud of our yearly lab course Algorithmic Battle, which I have hosting in recent years.
Its unique teaching concept allows students to find out themselves what makes a problem hard in various settings, and furthermore lets participants experience the importance of rigorous testing when developing code. We obtained funding from a Freiraum Grant from Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre and a grant within the ICON ENHANCE Call 2025 for the further development of our lab.
Supervised Theses
The following thesis projects were completed already:
- "Online Travelling Salesperson Problem with Bounded Predictions" by Emilie Tröll
- "A Variant of the Online Travelling Salesperson Problem" by Anna Hansson
- "Online Broadcast with and without Advice" by Jannis Grosse-Verspohl
- "Time Analysis of Space Efficient Uniform Partitioning in Population Protocols " by Pascal Sahner
- "Online Knapsack with Removal and Predictions " by Kübra Güven
- "Balancing Risk and Reward - a Secretary Problem Variant with Reservations and cost-free Option" by David Frason
- "Online Tetris" by Luca Venier
- "Online Bin Packing with Estimated Item Sizes" by Andreas Usdenski
- "The Postdoc Problem with Reservation Costs " by Christian Mürtz
- "The Secretary Problem with Reservation Costs and Accepting one of the two best Candidates" by Jakob Junck
- "The Postdoc Variant of the Secretary Problem with Reservation Costs" by Mats Bierwirth
- "Pitch Detection Methods for Automatic Music Transcription" by Magnus Groß: here you can access the code of his practical part
Publications and Talks
- Online Unbounded Knapsack at Theory of Computing Systems 2025.
- Online Tetris is not competitive at FUN 2024.
- Online Simple Knapsack with Bounded Predictions at STACS 2024.
- Delaying Decisions and Reservation Costs at COCOON 2023.
- The Online Simple Knapsack Problem with Reservation and Removability at MFCS 2023.
- Transitive Avoidance Games on Boards of Odd Size in The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, Issue 4 (2021).
- The Secretary Problem with Reservation Costs at COCOON 2021.
Scholarships and Awards
- A Research ENHANCE.R grant of 20.000 Euros to fund my research on Online Algorithms with Estimates March 2025.
- Idea League Research Grant for a research stay at the Group for Algorithms and Didactics at ETH Zürich in February and March 2023.
- Springorum-Denkmünze in 2021.
- Part of the Dean's List of the faculty for my studies in mathematics.
- Funding of my studies by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes starting in 2016.
Studies
Before starting in the Theory Group, I studied mathematics with minors in economics and computer science at RWTH Aachen University. I obtained my master's degree with honors in December 2020.