Prof. Dr. Christoph Berkholz has been head of the Algorithms Group at the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science of the Department of Computer Science and Automation since August 2022.
Prof. Berkholz received his PhD from RWTH Aachen University in 2014. After postdoctoral stays in Stockholm, Berlin, and Berkeley, he was Junior Professor of Logic and Complexity at the Institute of Computer Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2019 and head of the DFG-funded Emmy Noether Junior Research Group Representation Complexity of Enumeration and Counting Algorithms. His research interests are in theoretical computer science, in particular the study of algorithmic methods and their principal limits. The scientist published about 30 papers on these research topics and participated in program committees of several international conferences and symposia on AI, Theoretical Computer Science, and Foundations of Database Systems.
The research and teaching of the Algorithmics Department is guided by the following two core questions: Under what conditions do efficient algorithms exist and how does the structure of "light" and "heavy" input instances differ? And what are the possibilities and the principal limits of concrete algorithmic strategies and solution methods? The methods investigated so far range from classical decision problems (such as the satisfiability test of propositional logic) to counting and enumeration algorithms (determining the number or generating all solutions) to dynamic algorithms that support efficient update operations. Concrete application areas of this research are query optimization and query evaluation on relational and probabilistic databases as well as methods and data structures in the area of SAT and constraint solving.