will happen from July 24th to July 28th 2023 , at the Campus Center of the University of Kassel, Germany. will be preceded by the Highlights Collaborative Research Week ( HCRW ), from 17h to 21st, at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Kassel.

key features and novelties:

  • Highlights is a conference without publication, where speakers give short presentations of their best work.
  • For this year's edition, there will be no participation fees.
  • The 2023 program chair is Supratik Chakraborty.
  • The 2023 organisation chair is Stefan Göller.
  • The conference is now five days , tutorials included.
  • An early round of submissions is organised to help the planning of travels.
  • The Highlights Collaborative Research Week ( HCRW ) is a new meeting, the week before the conference (from July 17th to July 21st), devoted to research collaborations between Highlights participants. HCRW happens the week after ICALP'23 in Paderborn, for encouraging direct commutation.
  • The Highlights Extended Stay Support Scheme ( HESSS ) helps organising and funding collaborations in the area.

is the eleventh of 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. 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. There are no publications.

We encourage you to attend and present your best work, be it already published or not, at .

Scope

Representative areas include, but are not limited to:
  • Algorithmic Model theory
  • Automata Theory
  • Databases
  • Games for Logic and Verification
  • Logic
  • Verification

Important Dates

Submission deadline April 25
Notification May 5
Early Registration TBA
Highlights Collaborative Research Week July 17 - July 21
Conference July 24 - July 28

Registration

Registration for Highlights'23 has not been opened yet.

Program

The program has not yet been published.

Highlights Code of Conduct

Highlights is committed to be a respectful forum for its participants, free from any discrimination or harassment of any nature, particularly when abuse of power is involved. All Highlights attendees are expected to behave accordingly.

If you experience or witness discrimination, harassment or other unethical behavior at the conference, we encourage you to seek advice and remedy by consulting with the SafeToC counsellor of Highlights: Sylke Ernst.

The local organizers are entitled to remove registered participants from the conference (without refunding the conference fees) if they are deemed to pose an ethical risk to other participants.

Invited Talks and Tutorials

Tutorials

Bernd FinkbeinerSaarland University and CISPA, Germany
Edouard BonnetENS Lyon, France

Invited Talks

Udi BokerReichman University, Israel
Véronique BruyèreUniversity of Mons, Belgium
Sophie PinchinatIRISA, France
Sven ScheweUniversity of Liverpool, UK
Meena MahajanInstitute of Mathematical Sciences, India

Modalities of Attendance

is an event that will take place on-site (barring unforeseen circumstances), and the preferred form of participation is in person. Remote attendance via a video stream will also be offered, but with limited possible interactions for these participants.

Before coming from far away, please review how your trip and international flights are contributing to climate change. We encourage you to take the train as much as possible, possibly taking the opportunity for visiting colleagues on the way and thus decomposing the travel into smaller pieces.

More generally, we encourage you to make the most of your stay. This means extending your journey to the previous and/or following weeks for more scientific activities in Kassel and around. Several initiatives are here to help you in this task:

  • You can participate in the Highlights Collaborative Research Week ( HCRW ), July 17-21, the week before highlights, in Kassel). We especially encourage you to come to the HCRW if you attend (ICALP'2023), which happens just before the HCRW , in Padeborn.
  • You can attend ICALP'2023(July 10-14, in Padeborn)
  • You can attend CAV'2023(July 17-22, in Paris)
  • You can use the Highlights Extended Stay Support Scheme ( HESSS ) for finding collaborators and organising visits.

Early Submissions

Submissions should take the form of a short abstract describing the content of the presentation and its interest. It should serve as a proposal for a presentation. Hence, submissions should have a single author — the speaker. They can concern any recently published, to be published, or ongoing work of the speaker. We expect you to present your favourite result of the year, so there should be at most one submission per speaker. The abstract should list co-authors, if any. Optionally, an extended abstract of up to two pages may be attached as a PDF file.

We encourage both young and senior researchers to present.

The first early round of submissions is open until February 17. By submitting before this first deadline, you will profit from an early notification by February 28 which may help you in organising your journey. Other presentations are to be submitted by April 25th, with a notification May 5th.

Submissions will not lead to publications. There are no formal proceedings and we encourage the presentation of work published or presented elsewhere.

The talk (which is short, around 10 minutes) can be doubled with a poster. In this case, it has to be sent more than one week before the event, and will be printed by the organisation team.

Submission page

Getting There

In the following, you can find some information on how to get to Northern Hesse, depending on the mode of transport.
by car An overview of the university locations with site maps and car parking info can be found here.
by train The railway stateion for long distance trains is Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe, whereas for regional travel you could alternatively use Kassel main station (Hauptbahnhof). Train times and more information is available at Deutsche Bahn.
by plane The closest airports to Kassel are Kassel-Calden, Frankfurt, Hannover and Paderborn. You can take a taxi from Kassel-Calden or use bus route 130 to get to Kassel city centre. You can find the timetables on the website of the Nordhessischer VerkehrsVerbund (NVV).

Getting around Kassel can be done on the trams and buses of the Kasseler Verkehrsgesellschaft, by foot or with one of the 400 bikes that can be rented (for more information see nextbike). The Highlights conference itself takes place in the campus centre near Holländischer Platz. You can find a list of all relevant locations of the university here.

Normally, you require a visa and residence permit to enter Germany. Nationals from EU memberstates, Iceland Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland are generally not required to obtain a visa to enter Germany. Similarly, nationals from Australia, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, South Korea and the USA do not need a visa to enter. See here for a full list of countries enjoying visa exceptions. If you require an invitation letter, please contact Stefan Göller and provide your full address, arrival and departure date.

Highlights Collaborative Research Week

also organises an extra week, the Highlights Collaborative Research Week ( HCRW ), from July 17th to July 21st, at the University of Kassel.

Participants to Highlights can register to this week, and are then free to organise any scientific activities. It is up to you to decide what this week should be. Possibilities can be to

  • meet someone in particular,
  • organise or attend a seminar/workshop/reading group,
  • gather for solving open problems.

Highlights organisation is offering the opportunity, the working space and support at the university, and some web-tools for the scientific organisation.

We encourage participants to propose activities in advance. Please contact the program chair (Supratik Chakraborty) and the organisation chair (Stefan Göller) to communicate your proposals.

Highlights Extended Stay Support Scheme

The Highlights Extended Stay Support Scheme( HESSS ) is an incentive for collaborations between participants to the conference and researchers working in research units reachable by train from the conference locations. The objective is to foster interactions with low carbon footprint. The mechanism is as follows:

  • Research units wanting to participate in the scheme are listed below. These units are willing to fund collaborations between highlights' participants and their members.
  • The pair of a Highlights' participant and a member of one of a listed research unit submit a proposal which takes the form of a mail containing names, period of collaboration, and a sentence describing the activity planned. It has to be sent to the HESSS contact person of the research unit.
  • The decision of acceptation is up to the research unit. It may be in particular subject to scientific scope, number or requests, or, eg, favouring distant participants.
  • The only strict rule is that the visit should be around the moment of Highlights, and no plane should be taken by the visitor between Highlights and the visit.
  • Research units interested in participating in the program should contact .

Participating Research units

TCS group in Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen Distance from Kassel is about 30 minutes by train. Typical subjects of interest include word combinatorics, string algorithm, or word equations. (more info).
Contact Florin Manea.
TCS/Formal Methods group at University of Kassel Typical subjects of interest include formal specification and verification; logic in CS; automata and formal languages; verification in machine learning; formal methods for learning tools. (more info).
Contact Martin Lange.
Models of Computation group at MPI-SWS in Kaiserslautern Distance from Kassel is just over 3h by train, 5:30 from Paderborn. Our interests are in automata, logic, infinite-state systems, decidability, complexity, and algorithmic group theory. (more info).
Contact Georg Zetzsche.
LogiDAC group at TU Dortmund University Distance from Kassel is 2h 15 by direct train, 1h from Paderborn. The group is interested in various aspects of Database Theory and Logic & Complexity, with some emphasis on constant-time parallel dynamic algorithms. (more info).
Contact Thomas Schwentick.
Theoretical Computer Science group in Leibniz Univertität Hannover Distance from Kassel is 1h15 by train, 2h from Paderborn. Typical subjects include (parameterised) complexity theory, logic in computer science (nonmonotonic and nonclassical logics), enumeration complexity, and recently neural networks. (more info).
Contact Arne Meier.
Theoretical Computer Science Group at the University of Duisburg-Essen (based in Duisburg) Distance from Kassel is 3h30 by train, 2h from Paderborn. Research areas include concurrency theory, coalgebra, graph transformation, fixpoint theory, reasoning under uncertainty. (more info).
Contact Barbara König.

Committees