Nikolaus Augsten

Prof. Nikolaus Augsten is a Professor and Head of the Database Research Group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Salzburg. He previously held positions at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, and visited Technische Universität München (TUM) and Washington State University. His research focuses on data-centric applications, approximate matching techniques for complex data structures, and efficient index structures for similarity search.

Education: PhD from Aalborg University (Denmark, 2008), supervised by Prof. Michael Böhlen. Master's from Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland).

Research interests include hierarchical data similarity (e.g., tree structures), scalable algorithms for tree edit distance, and applications in e-government and XML search engines. His work emphasizes practical solutions for tree-to-tree matching and similarity joins.

Selected Awards:

• ICDE 2010 Best Paper Award for TASM: Top-k Approximate Subtree Matching

Advising includes PhD student Mateusz Pawlik (thesis: Efficient Computation of the Tree Edit Distance). His group develops open-source tools like the RTED algorithm and approximate tree matching libraries.

Labs/Teams: Database Research Group at University of Salzburg, collaborating on projects like Tree Edit Distance reference implementations and set similarity join algorithms.