Posted: 14th June 2024

Former DPhil student Ruiwen Dong has received a Distinguished Dissertation Award from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) for his thesis on Algorithmic Problems for Subsemigroups of Infinite Groups.

The annual award promotes and recognises outstanding dissertations in the field of Theoretical Computer Science and was presented to Ruiwen at the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP) conference in Tallinn, Estonia, in July. 

Ruiwen’s thesis, completed in 2023, deals with algorithmic problems in infinite groups. It establishes a large number of deep results and develops many novel algorithms for decision problems in groups that, until recently, had seemed completely out of reach. Ruiwen was supervised by Professors Christoph Haase and James Worrell.  

I am very pleased to receive this award. I am grateful for the distraction-free environment provided by the department, where I could freely explore any research direction, including interdisciplinary areas, and focus one hundred percent of my working time on research. Ruiwen Dong

Having completed his DPhil at the department in 2023, Ruiwen is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Universität des Saarlandes in Germany. He will return to Oxford in October as a Fellow by Examination (Junior Research Fellow) at Magdalen College. 

Ruiwen is interested in problems in algorithmic algebra that lie on the border of decidability and undecidability. His research areas include:  

• Decision problems in infinite groups and semigroups 
• Automata theory and its connections to symbolic dynamics and group theory 
• Computer algebra, especially computational algebraic geometry 

EATCS is an international organisation founded in 1972. It aims to facilitate information exchange among theoretical computer scientists, as well as to stimulate cooperation between theoretical and practical communities in computer science. 

You can find out more about Ruiwen’s award here:  

https://eatcs.org/index.php/component/content/article/1-news/2984-eatcs-honours-three-outstanding-phd-theses-with-the-eatcs-distinguished-dissertation-award-for-2023  

You can view Ruiwen’s full thesis here: 

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a927a4df-2e2d-4c85-a3b3-354b1ab77817