The Polish Information Processing Society distinguishes AGH UST alumni

Andrzej Szaflarski, MSc, received the second prize (cash prize of PLN 4,000) for his thesis titled QRS Detection Algorithms in Electrocardiogram Signals, written under the supervision of an AGH UST Associate Professor, Dr hab. Marek Miśkowicz.

The thesis, consulted with members of Professor Miśkowicz’s research team, is related to the field of medical computer science and contains the original algorithm for QRS detection in ECG signals, accompanied by a comprehensive evaluation of its efficiency and computational complexity with respect to the solutions found in the literature. ‘The detection efficiency of the algorithm developed is 99.8% and is the highest in the class of QRS detection algorithms optimised in terms of energy use that have been described in the most recent literature’, says the supervisor. ‘The thesis shows a high degree of technical advancement and is scientific in nature, and the solutions obtained have been submitted to the patent procedure’.

‘My adventure with programming and computer science in general started only when I was admitted to a university. The experience in programming that I had gradually acquired allowed me to actively participate in advanced research projects. The first such activity was the design and implementation of an algorithm that generates triangular and tetrahedral meshes that can be used in simulations and analyses related to smog propagation. The idea of investigating automatic QRS detection algorithms in ECG signals as part of my MA thesis came about during a course in Medical Computer Science. It was then that the interest in processing and analysing ECG signals sprung out, and the promising results of the course project gave me hope for an interesting continuation of the work, this time as part of my MA thesis. Currently, I live in my home region, the Polish Highlands (Podhale), where I work remotely as a software engineer developing 5G technology. In my spare time, I try to preserve the vernacular folklore and am an amateur football player’.

Bartosz Kusek, MSc, received the third prize (cash prize of PLN 3,500) for his thesis titled Algorithms for Approval-Based Elections with Structured Preferences, written under the supervision of Professor Piotr Faliszewski.

The paper is related to the algorithmics of approval voting. This is a type of election in which a voter might give one point to each candidate and then the candidates with the highest score become winners. Such a mode of voting is modelled, for example, by various sports contests: candidates are athletes, and voters are judges who assess whether a given athlete should pass to the next stage of the competition. ‘Bartosz Kusek investigated the computational complexity of the assessment problem of how close to victory a given candidate was when the votes cast conformed to certain structural properties. Interestingly, while, in general, such structural assumptions tend to simplify the problems considered, one of the most fascinating results of Bartosz Kusek’s study is the indication of a case when the problem becomes difficult (formally, for the general version of the problem, there is an effective multinomial algorithm, while the structured version is NP-Hard). It is the first such result in the world in approval-based election algorithmics’, says the supervisor.

‘I managed to discover my passion for algorithmics already in secondary school. This passion was my main drive throughout the course of my studies. I enjoyed sharing it with others, which is why I was an active member of a BIT Student Research Club. My interests in computational social choice theory emerged when I decided to write my engineering thesis under the supervision of Professor Faliszewski. It asks questions that become an exciting topic in algorithmics and computational complexity theory. After the completion of my engineering project, it was time to write a paper more scientific in nature. Despite my wide interests in quantum computer science and bioinformatics, I have once again turned to choice theory. Thanks to Professor Faliszewski, I managed to find problems the solving of which became my contribution to computational social choice theory’.

25 theses defended in 9 Polish higher education institutions were submitted to the PIPS competition. The first cash prize of PLN 5,000 was awarded to Jan Kopański, MA, from the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics, and Mechanics of the University of Warsaw.