Highlights Extended Stay Support Scheme

The HESSS is an incentive for collaborations between participants of the conference and researchers working in research groups reachable by train from the conference location. The objective is to foster interactions with low carbon footprint. The mechanism is as follows:

  • Research groups willing to participate in the scheme will be listed on the webpage. These groups are offering to fund collaborations between HIGHLIGHTS'25 participants and their members.
  • The pair of a HIGHLIGHTS'25 participant and a member of a listed research group submit a proposal, which takes the form of an email containing names, period of collaboration, and a sentence describing the planned activity. It has to be sent to the HESSS contact person of the research unit.
  • The decision of acceptance is up to the research group. In particular, it may be subject to scientific scope, number of requests, or e.g., favouring distant participants.
  • The only strict rule is that the visit should be around HIGHLIGHTS'25, and no airplane should be taken by the visitor to travel from HIGHLIGHTS'25 to the visit location.

Workshops

Workshop on Algebraic Methods in Automata Theory

The workshop will be lightweight with at most around two hours of talks per day, which will be held in a blackboard style. The idea is to have one talk in the morning and one in the evening, which allows maximum time for participants to work together. In the first session, open problems will be presented to foster collaborations between the participants.

The exact program has not yet been decided on. It will be made precise progressively, and take into account the interests of the participants. Possible topics include semigroups, decidability of classes of languages, algebras, categories, monads, and many more.

More information can be found in the appropriate stream of the Highlights Zulip server. Do not hesitate to post and declare your interest in the workshop there. You can also contact Thomas Colcombet or Rémi Morvan by email for more details.
Workshop on Population Games

This workshop will discuss the current status of various problems related to population games, populations of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and explorable automata. The objective is to review the models, the state-of-the-art, the proof techniques employed so far, and the main open problems. The duration of the workshop and the time allocated for presentations will depend on the number of participants.

Quick reminder: Population games are played by two players, Laetitia (letters) and Terrence (transitions), on an NFA, with N tokens placed on an initial state. At each turn Laetitia picks a letter x, and Terrence answers by moving each token along an x-labelled transition. The goal of Laetitia is to gather all tokens in a final state eventually. Another version of this game exists, where Terrence picks the x-transition of each token at random from the available ones. Laetitia then tries to gather all tokens in a final state with probability 1.

Here are some possible topics: (1) The asymptotic (expected) time Laetitia needs to win against N tokens. Some strong conjectures have been formulated, and some of them proven, both in the randomised and the adversarial case. (2) Explorable automata (which generalise population games and history-determinism) and related decision problems. (3) Constrained flow problems and their connection to parameterised verification. Suggestions are welcome!

Please let me know if you want to participate, which subjects interest you the most, and if you would like to present something.
Workshop on Enumeration Complexity

This is a two days workshop on Monday and Tuesday. We intend to have a few talks and collaborative working.

Some possible subjects:

  • logical characterization of enumeration classes
  • how to properly define constant delay, application to generating language of automata and grammars
  • understanding enumeration algorithm/classes with polynomial space or no space
  • how practice can inspire us new complexity measures and different problems

Please tell me if you intend to participate and even better if you want to present something related or have a topic to discuss that you like to discuss.
25th Max Planck Advanced Course on the Foundations of Computer Science

The goal of this year's ADFOCS is to educate people with a TCS background on recent advances in graph decomposition techniques and their use in designing efficient algorithms. The focus of the summer school will be on the following topics:

  • Structure theory for graph classes with forbidden induced subgraphs and designing efficient algorithms on such graphs (Maria Chudnovsky)
  • Structural Sparsity and efficient algorithms for First-Order model checking (Michał Pilipczuk)
  • Expander decompositions and their variants, and their applications to design (near) linear-time algorithms (Thatchaphol Saranurak)

Sponsors