Introduction

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

Jewels of Automata Theory 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 name of the conference itself has changed, previous editions ran under the name AutoMathA. The conference Jewels of Automata Theory 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.

Key features of Highlights 2024:

• Highlights is a conference without publication, where spearkers give short presentations of their best work.
• The 2024 edition is colocated with Jewels of Automata Theory a conference featuring invited talks on mathematical aspects of automata theory.
• A chat of the conference is available during the event, and throughout the year.
• There is an early round of submissions and notifications to help with travel planning.
• The Highlights Collaborative Research Week (HCRW) offers means for research collaborations/discussions between participants. HCRW is scheduled after the conference.
• The Highlights Extended Stay Support Scheme (HESSS) helps organising and funding collaborations in the vincinity of Highlights.
• Highlights now has an environmental chair, Antoine Amarilli, in charge of assessing the carbon footprint of the event.

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

Scope

Representative areas include, but are not limited to:

Important Dates

Modalities of attendance

Highlights'24 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. The excact address of the venue is LaBRI, bâtiment A30, 351 cours de la libération, 33405 Talence.

Submission to Highlights'24 is open to everyone, and attendance to the conference is not a requirement. The selection procedure will not take into account in-person attendance. Authors who do not intend to attend Highlights'24 in-person must commit to this choice when submitting their talk proposal. If accepted, authors of such talk proposals will have the opportunity to share a prerecorded video of their talk, which will be made available on the conference website.

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 Bordeaux and around. Several initiatives are here to help you in this task:

• You can participate in the Highlights’ Collaborative Research Week (HCRW, September 21-27) in the week after Highlights'24, in Bordeaux.
• You can use the Highlights Extended Stay Support Scheme (HESSS) for finding collaborators and organising visits.

Submission

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 early round of submissions is open until Monday, April 15. By submitting before this deadline, you will profit from an early notification by April 26 which may help you in organising your journey. The regular submission deadline is Monday, June 17, with a notification by June 28.

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. Further information about poster submissions will be provided.

Posters

In addition to their talk, authors have the option to submit a poster, which will be printed and displayed at the main entrance of LaBRI throughout the week (or half of the week if there are too many). For those participating in the Highlights Collaborative Research Week, the posters will also be displayed during that second week.

Submit your posters in pdf format to Corto Mascle by September 5th AoE, with the subject Highlights 2024 poster. Please ensure that your posters are formatted in A1 size. If you include images, make sure they have a resolution of at least 4 megapixels. You can also send any questions regarding the posters to that same email address.

Registration

Participants to Highlights ’24 and Jewels of Automata Theory '24 must register before Sunday, July 7 by completing the form in the webpage indicated below. The registration fee for on-site attendance is 85,25 EUR. Online attendance is free, but registration is required.

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: Rémi Morvan.

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.

Highlights Collaborative Research Week

Highlights also organises an extra week, the Highlights Collaborative Research Week (HCRW) from September 21 to September 27, 2024 at LaBRI.

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

We encourage participants to propose activities in advance. For participating, just mention it during the registration process, and register to the HCRW stream in the Zulip chat. This is the place where the activities during the week will be organised. You can declare there what are your center of interests, what topic you would be happy to work on with other participants, or what activities you would like to participate to.

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 us through the appropriate channels on Zulip.

Invited Speakers

Committees

Program Committee

Organizing Committee

Steering Committee

Sponsors