Higher-level school students from throughout Upper Austria served as the selection committee, selecting Heisinger as the first-place winner in recognition of his outstanding Master's thesis titled "Programmbeweise - gemeinsam geht's schneller".

The event took place on campus in HS 1, bringing some 450 students together to enthusiastically attend the awards ceremony. Using their cell phones, they voted on the short presentations and crowning Maximilian Heisinger as the winner. Under the title "Programmbeweise – gemeinsam geht's schneller", Heisinger focused on automatic problem solvers, many of which often have very long computation times. By breaking the overall problem down into smaller sub-problems and solving them in parallel, more shared approach, Heisinger was able to present results in a significantly shorter time.

The runners-up included DI Daniel Hofer (2nd place - "Strom ohne Netz: Wie kann man Solarenergie bei jedem Wetter intelligent nutzen?") and DI Rudolf Hanl (3rd place - "Musiknoten: Das Toolkit für Komponist*innen").

Outstanding Quality and Diversity
JKU Computer Science graduates who earned a “1” on their respective Master’s thesis were eligible to apply for the award. A panel of experts pre-selected the top three theses. Jury chairman a.Univ. Prof. Paul Grünbacher remarked: "Computer scientists and IT specialists are still in high demand. In this regard, I am pleased that so many young people came to the awards ceremony today and could see for themselves the type of high quality and diverse programs we have here at the JKU. Congratulations to the finalists - not only on their outstanding work, but also on their ability to present their topics in an engaging, approachable, and humorous way."

About the Award and its Namesake
Endowed with €1,500 in prize money, the computer science award is sponsored and presented by Dynatrace (main sponsor), the Austrian Computer Society, and the Austrian Society for Computer Science. Named after Prof. Adolf Adam (1918-2004), the award is presented to an Austrian statistician and computer scientist. Prof. Adam was appointed to the University of Social and Economic Sciences in Linz in 1966 and created the Linz Information Science Program (LIP), paving the way to establish computer science as a recognized academic degree program. Linz was the first Austrian university to create a degree program in computer science program in 1969. Prof. Adam is also credited with leading the initiative to rename the university Johannes Kepler University Linz in 1971.

About Maximilian Heisinger
Maximilian Heisinger (25) is from Linz and works at the Institute for Symbolic Artificial Intelligence. In his free time, he likes to cycle, play computer games, and tinker with technical devices.