Today was the ceremonial graduation day on which new bachelors, masters, and also Dr.s (PhDs in the Anglo-Saxon world) were celebrated who received their degrees from the department of informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) within the last year. This year's graduation day coincided with the 50th anniversary of the introduction of computer science as a field of study and as a diploma degree.

I was among those honoured for completing the Dr. last year, (see my dissertation page). In total 44 freshly minted Dr.s, 292 masters, and 261 bachelors where celebrated today.

Furthermore, I was awarded the Uniserv Research-Prize "Algorithms for Efficient Data-Processing" for the best dissertation in the field of fast algorithms in the academic year 2017/2018 at the KIT department of informatics by the talent committee of the department.

I would like to thank Uniserv for endowing the department and my dissertation with this prize and especially the talent committee for selecting my work. It was a great and pleasant surprise to receive such a notification in the morning email inbox, which as usual contained many "prize and distant inheritance" emails. But on that day one of them was real, and I nearly overlooked it.

My dissertation was the central purpose in my life for many years, and receiving the prize helps me feel the time was well spent and consider it as confirmation of having furthered the field of informatics a tiny bit. It is rare to receive such honours and I am truly grateful.

Uniserv wrote a much longer honorific press release in German.

Having just finished my PhD thesis in computer science (see the corresponding dissertation), I ventured to actually print it as a proper book. In this article I want to share some of my experience with three print-on-demand book publishers:

• epubli.de (a smaller German publisher),
• Amazon CreateSpace, now called Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP),
• and IngramSpark, which is the self-publishing branch of Ingram.

Disclaimer: these are my experiences, yours will probably be different. And I hope print-on-demand quality will improve further in the future.

Below are macro photographs of the various print proof and other copies I received from the publishers. The photographs were taken with a Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphone with a (cheap) macro lens. Hence the colors and blur in the photos should be considered with caution, but the sharpness and detail level is sufficient for some discussion.

TL;DR: Amazon's print proof from the USA has the nicest print and color, but they only produce paperback covers. IngramSpark's prints are second best, have a lower resolution, but they produce hardcovers and consistent quality.

Amazon Print Proof from the USA

Uploading the PDF to Amazon CreateSpace is straight-forward due to the convenient web interface. The Amazon CreateSpace print proof was manufactured in Lexington, KY, USA, it was shipped three days after ordering, and arrived eleven days after ordering. For an international shipment from the USA to Germany that is a very acceptable delivery time.

The print quality of the Amazon Print Proof was in my option the best. It has the highest resolution, bright colors, and solid black. The paper and entire book has the feel of high-quality color laser printer output. Sadly, they the only produce paperback softcover books and I preferred a hardcover. On the plus side, publishing via Amazon gives you a free CreateSpace-ISBN and it is immediately listed in the world-wide Amazon catalog.

Original PDF

As a comparison to the printed books, the pictures above show the same excepts rendered as a bitmap image. Note that the layout of the words in each cover image may differ, because each cover needed to by typeset individually to the individual specifications of the publisher.

The road to a Dr. title (PhD in the Anglo-Saxon world) is often long, rough, and twisted. First you have to do original research, produce novel results, publish articles, and then write and ultimately publish a dissertation. Defending your research in the dissertation in front of a panel of professors is one of the final milestones on that journey.

On July 3rd, I successfully defended my dissertation at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the dissertation text has now been published as a book.

Published Dissertation

My final dissertation PDF is available here: dissertation-Bingmann-Scalable-String-and-Suffix-Sorting.pdf .

It has also been published at the KIT library, on arXiv:1808.00963, and finally as a print-on-demand paperback from Amazon.

The published book cover's background shows a list of most common words in the Wikipedia. The words are sorted and their distinguishing prefix is marked in blue. The cover is available as a double-page PDF: dissertation-cover.pdf , and as front and back separately: dissertation-cover-front.pdf and dissertation-cover-back.pdf .

The LaTeX source code for my dissertation is available for download: dissertation-source.zip (791 KiB). The complete text is in one .tex file, all figures (except the creative commons logo) are generated from the LaTeX code.

Dissertation Defense Presentation

The slides of my presentation during the defense are available for download here: dissertation-defense-slides.pdf .

The presentation was only part of the whole defense. My actual slide set also had almost 200 more backup slides, which however were collected from all the other talks already available on this homepage. These backup slides helped greatly in the examination question after the presentation.