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["Highlights Communication (Antonio Casares)" <address@concealed>]

HIGHLIGHTS’25, (Saarbrücken, Germany 1-5 September 2025) AND HCRW (6-12 September)

HIGHLIGHTS’25 is scheduled from September 1 to September 5, 2025 at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. It will be followed by the Highlights Collaborative Research Week (HCRW), from September 6 to 12, 2025.

HIGHLIGHTS’25 is the thirteenth 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’25 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.
• 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 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’25.

SCOPE

Representative areas include, but are not restricted to:

• Algebraic models of computation
• Algorithmic model theory
• Automata theory
• Databases
• Games for logic and verification
• Logic
• Verification

IMPORTANT DATES AND INFORMATION

• HIGHLIGHTS’25 webpage: https://highlights-conference.org/2025/
• Registration to the chat at https://highlights-conference.org/2025/zulip (no need if you did it last year)
• Submission page: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=highlights25
• Registration page: TBA
• E̶a̶r̶l̶y̶ ̶s̶u̶b̶m̶i̶s̶s̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶d̶l̶i̶n̶e̶:̶ ̶A̶p̶r̶i̶l̶ ̶1̶6̶,̶ ̶2̶0̶2̶5̶
• Early notification: May 7, 2025
• Regular submission deadline: May 28, 2025
• Notification: June 19, 2025
• Registration deadline: TBA
• Conference: September 1 - 5, 2025.
• Highlights’ Collaborative Research Week (HCRW): September 6 - 12, 2025.
• Estimated registration fee: <=100€

MODALITIES OF ATTENDANCE

HIGHLIGHTS’25 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’25 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’25 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 in the Highlights’ Collaborative Research Week (HCRW, September 6 - 12) in the week after HIGHLIGHTS, in Saarbrücken.
• 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.

The regular round of submissions is open until May 28, with a notification by June 17.

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.

Submission page: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=highlights25

HIGHLIGHTS COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH WEEK (HCRW)

HIGHLIGHTS’25 will be followed by the Highlights’ Collaborative Research Week (HCRW), from September 6 to 12 at the University of Saarbrücken.

Participants to HCRW are free to organise any scientific activity they wish. Possibilities can be to

• meet someone in particular and work together,
• organise or attend a seminar/workshop/reading group,
• gather for solving open problems,
• solicit, offer and participate in a lecture.
  Working spaces will be provided on site for these activities to take place.

We encourage participants to declare their intent to come and offer activities in advance using the chat of highlights.

HIGHLIGHTS EXTENDED STAY SUPPORT SCHEME (HESSS)

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: https://highlights-conference.org/2025/hesss. These groups are offering to fund collaborations between HIGHLIGHTS participants and their members.
• The pair of a HIGHLIGHTS 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, and no airplane should be taken by the visitor to travel from HIGHLIGHTS to the visit location.

INVITED SPEAKERS

TUTORIALS

• Christof Löding
• Szymon Toruńczyk

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

• Shaull Almagor
• Yu-Fang Chen
• Liat Peterfreund
• Mahsa Shirmohammadi

COMMITTEES

PROGRAM COMMITTEE HIGHLIGHTS’25

• Luca Aceto (Reykjavik University, Iceland, and Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, Italy)
• Christel Baier (TU Dresden, Germany), chair
• Marie van den Bogaard (Universite Gustav Eiffel, France)
• Michael Blondin (University of Sherbrooke, Canada)
• Agata Ciabattoni (TU Vienna, Austria)
• Wojciech Czerwiński (University of Warsaw, Poland)
• Anuj Dawar (University of Cambridge, UK)
• Dana Fisman (Ben-Gurion University, Israel)
• Marianna Girlando (University of Amsterdam, NL)
• Ichiro Hasuo (National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan)
• Antoine Mottet (TU Hamburg, Germany)
• B. Srivathsan (Chennai Mathematical Institute, India)
• Patrick Totzke (University of Liverpool, UK)
• Mahesh Viswanathan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US)
• Thomas Zeume (Ruhr University, Germany)

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

• Benjamin Kaminski

STEERING COMMITTEE

• Antoine Amarilli (environmental chair)
• León Bohn (webmaster)
• Antonio Casares (publicity chair)
• Supratik Chakraborty
• Thomas Colcombet (chair)
• Bartek Klin
• Sławek Lasota
• Sophie Tison