Highlights 2026

Highlights'26 is scheduled from September 7 to September 11, 2026 at TU Wien in Vienna, Austria. Highlights'26 is organized by the Formal Methods in Systems Engineering Research Unit (TU Wien), the Programming Languages and Verification Group (ISTA), and the Wolfgang Pauli Institute.

Highlights'26 will be followed by the Highlights' Collaborative Research Week CREW, from September 14 to 18, 202, at ISTA.

Highlights'26 is the fourteenth 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.

Highlights key features:

• Highlights is a conference without publications, where speakers give short presentations of their best work.
• 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 (CREW) offers means for research collaborations/discussions between participants. CREW is scheduled after the conference.
• The Highlights Extended Stay Support Scheme (HESSS) helps participants find collaborators and organise visits in the vicinity of HIGHLIGHTS.

We encourage you to attend and present your best work - be it already published or not - at Highlights'26.

Scope

Representative areas include, but are not limited to:

• Algorithmic model theory
• Automata theory
• Databases
• Games for logic and verification
• Logic
• Verification

Important Dates and Information

Invited speakers

Modalities of attendance

Highlights’26 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.

Submission for a presentation at Highlights'26 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'26 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 Saarbrücken and around. Several initiatives are here to help you in this task:

• You can participate to the Highlights’ Collaborative Research Week (CREW, September 14 - 18) in the week after Highlights, in IST Austria.
• You can use the Highlights Extended Stay Support Scheme (HESSS) for finding collaborators and organising visits.

Submissions and Guidelines

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.

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.

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: TBA.

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.

Committees