Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the Austrian Fonds zur F¨orderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF) under grant no. P12645-INF. The Austrian
Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence is supported by the Austrian Federal
Ministry of Education, Science and Culture.
In no particular order, I’d like to thank Saˇso Dˇzeroski, Bernard Zenko and
Ljupco Todorovski for one week of research collaboration, many helpful hints
and discussions, inspiration for StackingC, valuable feedback on a preliminary
version of this thesis and for introducing me to a lot of interesting people at
recent conferences; Gerhard Widmer for letting me find a suitable research field
on my own, for helping me write my first paper – and for employing me in
the first place; Eduard Gr¨oller for accepting to be my second examiner and for
pointing me towards some interesting proceedings; Johann Petrak for helping
me write my first paper, too, some feedback on later papers and a lot of technical
support; Johannes (Juffi) Furnkranz¨ for helpful tips, valuable feedback and a
lot of useful references; Elias Pampalk for valuable feedback on a preliminary
version of Chapter 3; Simon Dixon for sharing with me his tricks on squashing
papers in LaTeX – fortunately, this thesis does not need them; Arthur Flexer
for pointing me towards Erich Mittenecker’s book on statistical evaluation of
experiments, which finally enlightened me as to how to implement all these
statistical tests – hopefully properly; and especially Robert Trappl who manages
our small research institute so well that even my many travels to various faraway conferences in nice places such as Key West, Cascais, Sydney, Helsinki and
Maebashi could be easily supported.
Thanks also to my family, who supported me in so many ways that I will not
list them out of fear of forgetting something; to all my friends for motivation,
distraction and encouragement; and to myself for finally finding the willpower
to push this through – driven by deadlines as usual.
Special thanks to Sonja Reitinger for tangible and intangible support – e.g.
in the form of letting me use her notebook to finish this thesis in bed.