From September 16–19, 2025, the 10th anniversary edition of the student conference STIGMA was held, organized by the Department of Theoretical Computer Science at the Faculty of Information Technology at CTU. The main goal of the conference was to present research by students, PhD candidates, and young researchers. There was also space for discussions on open problems in the field.
Tuesday’s program was opened by Dr. techn. Ing. Jan Legerský with a lecture “Pentagonal bipyramids lead to the smallest flexible embedded polyhedron.” The talks continued with student Matěj Kříž presenting “A Nearly Best-Possible Approximation Algorithm for Node-Weighted Steiner Trees.” The evening program concluded with PhD students Ing. Jan Pokorný and Ing. Michal Dvořák introducing their papers “Pathfinding in Self-Deleting Graphs” and “Density of Traceable Graphs.”
On Wednesday, the morning block was opened by students Bc. Matěj Ptáček with a talk on his paper “Cats in Cubes” and Albert Havliček with “On monotonicity in Maker-Breaker graph colouring games.” In the afternoon, student Bc. Jarmila Fialová presented her bachelor’s thesis “Translation of MSOL formulas to finite automatons.” The evening program was devoted to extremal combinatorics. Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Alexander Clifton presented his work on “Ramsey Theory for Diffsequences.” The conference also welcomed Dr. Robert Hancock from the University of Oxford, who presented the paper “Orientation Ramsey thresholds.” Wednesday evening concluded with a lecture by researcher Mgr. Jan Volec, Ph.D. on “Combinatorial inequalities and their applications.”
On Thursday, students Šimon Rataj, Bc. Jakub Švec, and Bc. Emma Hovorková presented their papers “Visit-Bounded Stack Automata,” “Exploring algorithmic solutions for the Independent Roman Domination problem in graphs,” and “Envy-freeness in house allocation problems.” In the evening, PhD candidate Ing. Daniela Černá presented her research on “Shattering triples with six permutations and related problems.”
The program concluded on Friday with student Bc. Patrik Drbal presenting his paper “On Solution Discovery via Reconfiguration” and Bc. Petr Laštovička with “Non-crossing shortest path lengths in planar graphs in linear time.”
“For me, STIGMA was a great combination of interesting lectures and a relaxed atmosphere. Every day we not only had the chance to learn something new and discuss it, but also to go on trips together or spend the evening playing board games and chatting. Thanks to that, I felt that a truly friendly community was formed here, one where it’s a pleasure to spend time even outside the program. I’m already looking forward to the next edition,” says Albert Havliček, who attended STIGMA for the first time this year.
