Highlights is an annual conference with the goal of integrating the community of researchers working on logic, games and automata. Papers from these areas are dispersed across many conferences, which makes them difficult to follow. A visit to the Highlights conference should offer a wide picture of the latest research in the field and a chance to meet everybody in the community, not just those who happen to publish in one particular proceedings volume.

Just like other conferences in the field, Highlights proposes tutorials and invited talks. The contributed talks are short, allowing participants to get an overview of a wide range of different topics in a short amount of time. Additionally, authors are encouraged to prepare posters about their work, which are then presented and discussed in poster sessions. There are no publications.

Highlights takes place on-site, and the preferred form of participation is to give a talk in person. However, we encourage participants to review how their trip to the conference is contributing to climate change.

Participants who are unable to attend can watch the talks remotely via a video stream, interact via text-based questions and answers. Crucially, the selection process will not discriminate between remote talks and in-person talks.

Scope

Representative areas include, but are not limited to:

Next Edition

The 2024 edition of Highlights will be jointly scheduled with Jewels of Automata Theory (previously known as AutoMathA) from September 16 to September 20 at the University of Bordeaux, France, in LaBRI. They will be followed by the Highlights Collaborative Research Week, from September 21 to September 27, 2024.

Highlights is the twelfth in the series of international conferences Highlights of Logic, Games and Automata, aiming at integrating the community working in algorithmic model theory, automata theory, databases, games for logic and verification, logic, and verification.

AutoMathA will be the second conference, after the one organised in 2015, which was itself the continuation of a European research project, that terminated in 2010. The conference AutoMathA 2024 will survey a wide picture of research in automata theory and related mathematical fields. It will consist of invited lectures which describe significant progress over the past years, and will be a meeting point for both young and senior researchers to learn and to discuss about automata theory, its connections with mathematics and its applications.

You can find more information on the page of the 2024 edition. The full call for papers can be found here.

Statistics

We at Highlights firmly believe in the imporance of inclusivity and diversity, which is why we strive to create an open and welcoming space for all individuals. In the following, we give a statistical insight into the gender composition of Highlights attendees. Note that the data is not complete (there is some data missing for previous editions). Further, the gender of attendees was not part of the registration form in the previous two editions, which is why we approximated the data for 2022 and 2023 based on the names that participants gave during registration. While this is clearly not a perfect system, it sheds at least some light on the ratio between male- and female-identifying participants. For the upcoming editions, we plan on including a prompt for gender in the registration form.

Carbon Emissions

During the 2022 edition of Highlights, we had a discussion about the ongoing climate crisis, the role of Highlights in this crisis, how to adjust the organization of the conference for future editions, and how to change the model of academic conferences more broadly. The slides for this introduction can be found here.

Highlights has signed the TCS4F manifesto, which aims to reduce the carbon footprint of the Theoretical Computer Science community. Individuals who are interested in supporting this cause can sign the manifesto here.

In order to reduce the carbon emissions of the conference, we encourage participants to review how their trip to the conference is contributing to climate change. Since the 2022 edition, we began estimating the overall carbon emissions produced by the conference. Below, we provide a breakdown of the emissions and provide the raw data that was used to compute the figures.

The linked data is given in the form of a csv file containing, for each one-way trip made by an attendee, the mode of transportation as well as the distance. The data is anonymized and does not contain any personal information. The code that is used for computing the emissions and anonzymizing the data can be found here.

Steering Committee

Steering Committee

Previous Editions

Below, you can find a list of editions that have already taken place. By clicking on an item, you will be redirected to the edition's website. Additionally, it is possible to download an archive containing rendered HTML versions of all previous editions here.