After the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, a few scientific communities faced cancellations of conferences, seminars, and research visits. Motivated by the need to establish new communication channels, a series of seminars called One World Seminars was initiated, as an attempt to keep the communities together. The pioneer of this project was One World Probability Seminar that inspired several other One World projects (among which, you might know the One World Combinatorics on Words Seminar).

This is a new series of online research seminars on topics related to Formal Languages and Automata Theory: One FLAT World Seminar (yes, we know, we broke a pattern here: we should have named it “One World FLAT Seminars”, but this name is funnier).

The main goal of this project is to keep the community working in our area alive and updated, by bringing together researchers from all over the world in a virtual, accessible, and inclusive environment. We believe that recently our community is quite fragmented, so having a common platform to share old and recent results on the one hand would help established researchers working on similar topics to find collaborators and fresh ideas and, on the other hand, young people, new in the area, would have a clear vision of what is going on in this branch of theoretical computer science.

The talks will be accessible via Zoom and will run, at least at the beginning, on a monthly basis.

Next talks

• RNA co-transcriptionality

  A platform for in vivo programming of molecular machines

  Speaker: Shinnosuke Seki

  November 20, 2024 at 14:00 UTC

  

  

  Transcription is a process in which an RNA sequence (of bases of 4 types \(A\), \(C\), \(G\), \(U\)) is synthesized from a DNA template sequence (of \(A\), \(C\), \(G\), \(T\)) according to the loss-less mapping \(A \to U\), \(C \to G\), \(G \to C\), and \(T \to A\). The resulting RNA sequence, called transcript, folds upon itself while being transcribed. This co-transcriptional folding (CF) is driven primarily by having helices form between complementary domains (factors), which bind with each other in the anti-parallel manner via base pairs \(A-U\), \(C-G\), and \(G-U\) and then twist, and secondly by having helices stacked... [Read More]

• Crosswords of formal languages

  Speaker: Stefano Crespi Reghizzi

  December 18, 2024 at 14:00 UTC

  

  

  The definition of crosswords as row-column combinations of words over an alphabet is applied to regular and context-free (CF) languages, thus producing picture (2D) languages. The letter-to-letter projection of regular crosswords coincides with the well-known family of (tiling system) recognizable pictures. Recent results for the CF case, and especially for the Dyck languages, are presented, that culminate in a generalized Chomsky-Schützenberger Theorem (CST) for CF crosswords. CST represents the family of pictures defined by projection of context-free crosswords, while it fully characterizes the more general family where the crossword is applied to CF languages over two alphabets, whose Cartesian product... [Read More]