Ing. Šimon Schierreich, Ph.D., a graduate of the doctoral programme at the Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague (FIT CTU), has been awarded the Josef Hlávka Prize for 2025. This prestigious award is presented to talented students and early-career researchers under the age of 33 who demonstrate exceptional abilities, creativity, and top-level results in their field. He received the award on 16 November 2025 at the Château in Lužany.
Šimon Schierreich completed his doctoral studies at the Department of Theoretical Computer Science at FIT CTU, where he worked in the G²OAT research group. He is currently a researcher on the Roboprox project and a postdoctoral researcher at AGH University of Krakow, where he is part of a research group led by Piotr Faliszewski. His research focuses on collective decision-making, algorithmic game theory, and computational social choice, with an emphasis on multivariate analysis and structural restrictions of computationally hard problems in these areas.
Šimon received the Josef Hlávka Prize primarily for his excellent publication record. Notable examples include two publications focused on improving the explainability and transparency of participatory budgeting—a modern form of democratic decision-making in which citizens directly choose projects funded from a portion of the public budget. Both papers aim to develop metrics that help better understand why some projects succeed in an election while others do not.
The paper Evaluation of Project Performance in Participatory Budgeting examines why certain projects fail in participatory budgeting and proposes metrics that enable their objective evaluation. The authors studied three main reasons why a project may lose: excessively high costs, insufficient voter support, and strong competition from other projects that share the same voter base.
“In the paper, we propose concrete measures—for example, how much a project would need to reduce its cost, how many additional votes it would require, or how many approvals of competing projects its supporters would have to withdraw in order for the project to succeed. These metrics increase the transparency of results and help voters better understand why the system decided the way it did,” says Šimon.
The second paper, Participatory Budgeting Project Strength via Candidate Control, focuses on the computational complexity of so-called candidate control—that is, how the outcome of participatory budgeting would change if certain projects were added to or removed from the election. The study shows that removing certain projects from the election can serve as a useful indicator of the strength of other projects. This can be interpreted as a measure of a project’s failure and can also be used to identify its strongest “competitors.” The paper thus contributes to understanding the dynamics of competition among projects and to evaluating their true strength within participatory budgeting.
“Receiving the Josef Hlávka Prize represents a strong recognition of several years of work for me. However, I see it primarily as an acknowledgment of the collective effort of my colleagues, because science today is rarely the work of a single individual. This experience reminds me how essential teamwork, mutual support, and the sharing of ideas are. At the same time, it motivates me to continue with even greater determination,” Šimon adds.
