From August 5–11, researchers and practitioners from academia and industry gathered at Queen’s University for CIAA 2026 and DCFS 2026.
Hosted by the Queen’s School of Computing and organized in part by our very own Dr. Salimur Choudhury and Queen’s School of Computing alumnus (PhD’21) Dr. Taylor Smith., these conferences brought together the international automata community to explore research spanning automata theory, algorithms, verification, natural language processing, quantum computing, bioinformatics, pattern matching, and more.
CIAA 2026 featured three distinguished invited speakers:
Nataša Jonoska, University of South Florida
“Traversing Crystals by Automata”
Anthony Bonato, Toronto Metropolitan University
“Burning, Cooling, and Liminal Burning Graphs”
Ian Mertz, Charles University
“Computing with a Full Hard Drive”
The conference also featured the prestigious Sheng Yu Award, research and tool-track presentations, and proceedings published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Dr. Kai Salomaa was also honoured for his several decades of contributions to CIAA and to the theory, implementation, and application of automata and related structures. As a special thanks, Salomaa was gifted with a personal book titled, “From Possibility to Reality”.
CIAA 2026 was held alongside DCFS 2026, continuing a week of international research and collaboration in theoretical computer science here in Kingston.
DCFS 2026 featured three distinguished invited speakers:
Michael Blondin, Université de Sherbrooke
“The Power and Limits of Population Protocols”
Michaël Cadilhac, DePaul University
“Formal Language Theory and Transformers”
Sandra Zilles, University of Regina
“Representing Concepts with Small Teaching Sets”
Thank you to all the researchers, speakers, organizers, and participants who made CIAA and DCFS 2026 a success!