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Stefan Neumann

@neumannstefan.com
427 followers 240 following 125 posts

Assistant professor @ TU Wien, associate faculty @ Complexity Science Hub. Previously: KTH, Brown, Uni Wien. I study algorithms for data science and social-network analysis. Connecting theory 🤝 practice. More info: neumannstefan.com.

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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 06/08/2026
OK, I am back from holiday. I spent most of my time offline (hiking in Austria is great!) but also did quite a bit of reflection on academia and AI. I will have some things to say. One of my intensions is to be more active on social media and I will also start a blog.
The view from a mountain. One can see two lakes and other mountains.
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 23/06/2026
For the summer issue of the EATCS Bulletin, it was my pleasure to talk to authors of the Decentralized Thoughts blog: Ittai Abraham, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Alin Tomescu. I really like their opinions on how blogs can do more than papers and the theory and practice of blockchains.
A screenshot from the interview with the following text.

Question: Several of you contrasted blog posts with papers. What can a blog do that a paper usually cannot?

Ittai: A paper is written under very specific incentives. In practice, the incentive is often to get accepted by three reviewers. That is not the same as teaching the reader what is important. A paper is not always written to explain what really happened or what the reader should remember. A blog post has a different goal: it can simply try to improve understanding. It can say, “here is the idea, here is why it matters, here is how it relates to other ideas.”
A blog can also be updated. If you later find a better proof, a better explanation, or a useful external resource, you can edit the post and add links. That is much harder with a paper, and even a book update is a big event. A blog post can remain useful for years precisely because it can be improved.

Alin: Blogs are good at collecting scattered knowledge. For a primitive such as ECDSA, there may be many papers, but not one place that explains the scheme, public-key recovery, batch verification, malleability, why Bitcoin used it, why Ethereum used it, and what the practical tradeoffs are. A blog can be a focused survey of one idea or one primitive. It does not have to claim novelty; it can focus
on clarity.

Kartik: That is important because academic writing often does the opposite. To get a paper accepted, you emphasize the difference from previous work. But when you want to understand an area, it is equally important to know when two things are really the same idea in different languages. A blog post can make those similarities explicit.
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 17/12/2025
I enjoyed reading this. I agree that throughout the last 10 years or so, CS has become a lot more empirical. This also means that there is a lot of work for theoretical computer scientists out there.
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 30/10/2025
The new EATCS Bulletin #147 is available! eatcs.org/images/bulle... In the TCS on the Web Column, I talked to the maintainers of the TCS Blog Aggregator: Nima Anari, Arnab Bhattacharyya and Gautam Kamath. It was a very fun interview! @gautamkamath.com @schmiste-ch.bsky.social
A screenshot with a short excerpt from the the interview.

Question: Are there any blog posts you’d like to highlight from over the years?

Gautam: I really like posts that share more about the humans behind the research. Omer Reingold ran a series on “research-life stories,” a great representative one is Bobby Kleinberg’s. Luca Trevisan had a series of posts from gay and lesbian computer scientists in commemoration of Turing’s 100th birthday, you can read his own account here.

Arnab: Completely agreed with Gautam. I’d also like to highlight Gil Kalai’s valiant effort at “Combinatorics and More.” Gil’s blog has been actively maintained since 2008! It’s still often the first place to break news about advances in combinatorics.
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 25/10/2025
STOC'26 will provide an *optional* pre-submission feedback based on Gemini. The model is optimized for checking mathematical rigor. Looks interesting. They also post example outputs and comments on them. Announcement: acm-stoc.org/stoc2026/sto... Example reviews: www.cs.cmu.edu/~dwoodruf/st...
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 16/10/2025
Such a strong growth in submissions over the past few years (probably because of LLMs?). 38% more than two years ago. Wow. An acceptance rate of less than 10% is really tough. Good luck to everyone who submitted!
Number ERC Starting Grant applications per year. 2024 there were 3474 submissions, in 2025 there were 3928 and in 2026 there were 4807.
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 15/10/2025
I was just briefly scrolling over the latest ACM Career News newsletter and I find it quite funny that it contains a picture of the German Federal Minister of Defense, Boris Pistorius.
A screenshot of the ACM Career News newsletter, showing its header.A screenshot of the ACM Career News newsletter, showing an article with a picture of the German Federal Minister of Defense.A screenshot of the ACM Career News newsletter, showing an article with a picture of the German Federal Minister of Defense. This time, as a closeup.A picture of the German Federal Minister of Defense, Boris Pistorius.
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 30/06/2025
Check out the latest edition of the EATCS Bulletin, featuring @timroughgarden.bsky.social on how he built one of the most successful TCS YouTube channels—with over 1 million views. The other articles are also very exciting. Have a look! www.eatcs.org/images/bulle...
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 11/03/2025
To remove noise, one can use the approach of "Denser than the densest subgraph" by Tsourakakis, Bonchi, Gionis, Gullo, Tsiarli. They change the objective function from density |E[S]| / |S| to measure how clique-like the subgraph is: |E[S]| - (|S| choose 2). This gives much more coherent clusters.
Screenshot of the following text:

Therefore, in practice the densest subgraph tends to return medium- to large-sized subgraphs (w.r.t. the number of nodes) but they are not very clique-like. Some works have therefore tried to modify the densest subgraph objective function to return smaller, more clique-like structures. Tsourakakis et al. [8] did this by considering the density function |E[S]|−α (|S| choose 2) which is non-negative if G[S] contains more than an α-fraction of all its possible edges. This penalizes subgraphs with a lot
of vertices and empirically we can observe that it tends to return smaller, more coherent subgraphs.Two much more concrete clusters: One for Europe, one for the US.Three clearer clusters: One for China, one for the Middle East (with less noise) and one for South America.
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 11/03/2025
Then the next clusters are a bit more noisy (arguably the first two are also noisy, but ok it's vanilla densest subgraph) also make some sense after eyeballing: Cluster 3: Middle East + India Cluster 4: Russia + countries in the vicinity Cluster 5: South America + Australia
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 11/03/2025
Today I will be teaching densest subgraph in my course. So, I implemented the greedy peeling algorithm ("Charikar's algorithm") and ran it on some flight dataset from @netzschleuder.skewed.de. The first two clusters nicely correspond to clusters in (1) Europe+US and (2) China.
Two world-maps showing clusters of airports of within Europe+US and within China.
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 17/02/2025
The (soft) deadline for this position is on Friday.
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 04/12/2024
The openness of Bluesky is great, and it is nice to see the creativity it encourages. blueskyroast.com/roast/stefan...
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 17/04/2024
How do you make a theoretical computer scientist happy? By giving them a large whiteboard. 😍
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 11/04/2024
Intriguing paper by Jon Kleinberg and Sendhil Mullainathan on arxiv today. They look justifying the effectiveness of LLMs theoretically. In a nutshell, they show that, even though *detecting* languages is difficult, *generating* from languages can be done asymptotically. (link below)
Screenshot from the paper.
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 14/03/2024
Very interesting talk today by Jingren Zhou on building large language models at Alibaba. @caimlTUwien @tu_wien
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 26/01/2024
Today is my final day at KTH. It was a great time and I will definitely miss it. I am most thankful to Aris Gionis for all of his support during this time, the people in his group, and the colleagues in the TCS division at large. Now I am heading back to Vienna (more info soon).
Picture of myself in front of a KTH logo.
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Stefan Neumann @neumannstefan.com · 22/11/2023
🚨🚨🚨 Very important iPadOS update for those of us living in Scandinavia.
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