Finding faults in Excel

A familiar situation for many: A large Excel file that includes many sheets, rows and columns – and in the end, the correct result stubbornly refuses to materialize. Troubleshooting can be complicated whenever numerous formulas and references are involved. Patrick Koch is working on the project “Debugging of spreadsheet programs (DEOS)”, funded by the FWF, which aims to simplify the search for errors. He recently received the “ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award” for his publication on this subject.

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A numbers person who models behaviour


Stephan Leitner realized at an early stage that he is a numbers person among the business and economics specialists, someone who feels more comfortable with the quantitative subjects than with the “softer” subjects. Today, following his recent habilitation, the newly minted associate professor pursues his research at the Department of Management Control and Strategic Management, where he is working on models that calculate the decision-making behaviour in companies as well as the effects of decisions, taking into account the behavioural sciences.

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“It turned out well.”

Paths are formed by being trodden. Denise Voci, having completed secondary school in the border town of Tarvisio, once dreamt of a life as a musician, before her path took her to Klagenfurt, where she studied Media and Communications Science. Today she works as a Predoc Scientist and is writing her doctoral thesis as part of an international project that explores cross-border media management.

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Artificially intelligent metal detector for the needle in the haystack of knowledge

There are individuals who are immensely knowledgeable. And yet, as Maria von Ebner-Eschenbach tells us, “knowledge expands when it is shared.” But does knowledge that has been gathered in vast knowledge bases always remain free of errors? And how does one go about drawing accurate conclusions from collected knowledge? Patrick Rodler, Post Doc at the Department of Applied Informatics, is working on artificially intelligent error detection and error correction in knowledge bases.

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