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.

The next talks

• Using automata to prove theorems about sequences

  Speaker: Jeffrey Shallit

  May 8, 2024 at 13:00 UTC

  

  

  Automata have proven very useful in practice, both for text searching and the analysis of various kinds of discrete systems. In this talk, however, I will show that they are also useful for (rigorously) proving theorems about sequences, and hence become a new and exciting tool for number theorists and combinatorialists. As an example, I will talk about a sequence of Benoit Cloitre, defined by a certain recurrence involving Fibonacci numbers. Many properties of this sequence were conjectured, and using automata we can now resolve all of them. The proofs are done using Walnut, a free open-source theorem-prover for automatic... [Read More]

• The hardness of decision tree complexity

  Speaker: Bruno Loff

  June 5, 2024 at 13:00 UTC

  

  

  In the world of formal languages, we have always been interested in the problem of finding the smallest “algorithm” for deciding a given language. Moore’s algorithm for DFA minimization is a standard part of a first course in theory of computing. Jiang and Ravikumar have shown, on the other hand, that NFA minimization is PSPACE-hard. [Read More]