Automata theory is the cornerstone of computer science theory. While there is much practical experience with using automata, this work is spread across diverse areas, including parsing, computational linguistics, text searching, device controllers, distributed systems, and protocol analysis. Consequently, techniques that have been discovered in one area may not be known in another. In addition, there is a growing number of symbolic manipulation environments designed to assist researchers in experimenting with and teaching about automata and their implementation; examples include FLAP, FADELA, AMORE, FireLite, Automate, Turing's World, FinITE, INR, and Grail. Developers of such systems have not had a forum in which to expose and compare their work. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together members of the academic, research, and industrial community who have an interest in implementing automata, to demonstrate their work and explain the problems they have been solving.
The proceedings of WIA 96 will appear shortly in the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series.
A Steering Committee for WIA was elected at WIA 96; it consists of:
The steering committee web site is: http://www.cs.ust.hk/~dwood/.wia97