StFX computer science professor Dr. Taylor Smith recently organized two international conferences in automata theory, the 30th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata (CIAA 2026) and the 27th International Conference on Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems (DCFS 2026), both held at Queen's University in Kingston, ON.
This is the first time since 2018 these conferences were organized by a Canadian professor at a Canadian institution.
Two years of work led to these conferences, held from August 5-11, and seeing attendees arrive from over a dozen countries to listen to 27 contributed talks and six invited talks by speakers hailing from Canada, the U.S., and the Czech Republic was rewarding, Dr. Smith says.
“To me, it was quite a high honour to be asked to organize these conferences,” says Dr. Smith, who worked together on them with colleagues at Queen's University. In addition, he edited the two proceedings volumes and spent the past year secretly editing a festschrift volume dedicated to his PhD supervisor, Kai Salomaa, containing 14 papers by 26 authors from around the world. He presented this volume to Dr. Salomaa during the conference.
“Considering that I first attended CIAA and DCFS as a student just a mere eight years ago, it's humbling to see how far I've come in that span of time both as an academic and as a member of my international research community,” Dr. Smith says. “It's one thing to see all my colleagues at conferences each year, but to have everyone come up to me after the close of each conference and tell me about what a great event it was, that's an entirely different and extremely fulfilling feeling. And of course, none of this would've happened without the help of Dr. Cezar Câmpeanu, Dr. Luca Prigioniero and Dr. Salimur Choudhury, and everyone local to Queen's who supported me throughout the conferences.”
Dr. Smith says initially, the plan was to host only the Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata at Queen's. “Our formal languages and automata theory research community has a handful of core conferences that we all attend annually, and it's a bit of a tradition that two or more of these conferences are collocated, both for ease of travel, and to bring together researchers whose work might not otherwise overlap. As it happens, the Conference on Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems (DCFS) was set to be colocated with another conference in Europe in 2026, but plans fell through and so DCFS needed a new organizer.”
Dr. Smith co-chaired that event with Dr. Prigioniero, a lecturer at Loughborough University in the UK and chair of DCFS 2025, and Dr. Câmpeanu, a professor at the University of Prince Edward Island.
CIAA and DCFS are two of the major conferences in automata theory, and many academics in the area attend both of these conferences each year to keep up with current research and exchange ideas.
“They both have long histories: this year was the 30th edition of CIAA and the 27th edition of DCFS. Funny enough, I have an interesting historical connection to both of these conferences, since their first editions were coincidentally each held in my hometown of London, Ontario.”
The last time either of these conferences were held in Canada, both were in Atlantic Canada: DCFS in Halifax and CIAA in Charlottetown, both in 2018. These were also the first conferences Dr. Smith ever attended as a PhD student “so 2026 was a bit of a combination of homecoming and reflection on how far I've come as a researcher myself,” he says.
Dr. Smith has also recently been named the guest editor of two journal issues, where authors of selected conference papers will be able to submit extended versions of their research work, as is the tradition in computer science. These issues will appear in Theoretical Computer Science and International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science, two of the most read and well-known journals in his area of study.
