# HIGHLIGHTS’26 (Vienna, Austria 7-11 September 2026) AND CREW (14-18 September) **HIGHLIGHTS’26** is scheduled **from September 7 to September 11, 2026** at **TU Wien**.  It is co-organized by ISTA, TU Wien and Wolfgang Pauli Institute.  Highlights'26 will take place at the main building of TU Wien, Karlsplatz 13, in the center of Vienna. HIGHLIGHTS’26  will be followed by the **Highlights' Collaborative Research Week (CREW)**, from **September 14 to 18, 2026**, at **ISTA**. **HIGHLIGHTS’26** is the fourteenth 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’26** 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. - There is an early round of submissions and notifications to help with travel planning - The _Highlights’ Collaborative REsearch Week_ (**CREW**) offers means for research collaborations/discussions between participants. CREW 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’26**. ## SCOPE Representative areas include, but are not restricted to: - Algebraic and categorical models of computation - Algorithmic model theory - Automata theory - Databases - Games for logic, verification, and semantics - Logic - Verification ## IMPORTANT DATES AND INFORMATION -   HIGHLIGHTS'26 webpage: https://highlights-conference.org/2026/ -   Registration to the chat at https://highlights-conference.org/2026/zulip (no need if you did it last year) -   Registration page: TBA -   Early-submission deadline: April 17, 2026 -   Early notification: May 08, 2026 -   Regular-submission deadline: May 29, 2026 -   Regular Notification: June 19, 2026 -   Early-bird registration deadline: July 17, 2026 -   Registration deadline: August 17, 2026 -   Conference: September 7- 11, 2026. -   Highlights’ Collaborative Research Week (CREW): September 14 - 16, 2026. -   Registration fee: TBA (tentative 160 EUR) ## MODALITIES OF ATTENDANCE **HIGHLIGHTS’26** 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'26 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'26 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 Vienna and around. Several initiatives are here to help you in this task: -  You can participate to the **Highlights’ Collaborative Research Week** (**[CREW](https://highlights-conference.org/2026/hcrw), September 14 - 18**) in the week after HIGHLIGHTS, in ISTA. -  You can use the **Highlights Extended Stay Support Scheme** (**[HESSS](https://highlights-conference.org/2026/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 29, 2026**, with a notification by June 19, 2026. 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/conferences/?conf=highlights26 ## HIGHLIGHTS' COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH WEEK (CREW) **HIGHLIGHTS’26** will be followed by the _Highlights’ Collaborative Research Week_ (**CREW**), **from September 14 to 18 at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria**. Note that this is located outside of Vienna, ISTA being 20 km North of Vienna. Special hosting arrangements on site during CREW will be made available for a limited number of participants on a first-come-first-served basis. The Highlights CReW is not a workshop nor a conference: it is simply a week in which researchers gather to work together, to collaborate on their current projects or to start new ones. Participants will be asked to bring open problems they are interested in and to present it on Day 1, so that they can then decide on the topics they work on throughout the week. We expect researchers from all generations and all countries. Expected registration fees will be 70€ for students, 120€ for non-students (early registration), subject to pending public funding applications. This will cover lunch, coffee breaks, and a social dinner. Some accommodation (in shared rooms) will also be provided at subsidised prices, on a first-come first-served basis. 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/2026/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 - Daniela Petrisan - TBA ### KEYNOTE SPEAKERS - Cécilia Pradic - Anthony Lin - Mirco Giacobbe - K. S. Thejaswini ### PROGRAM COMMITTEE HIGHLIGHTS'26 A. R. Balasubramanian, MPI-SWS Manuel Bodirsky, TU Dresden Lorenzo Clemente, University of Warsaw (chair) Javier Esparza,  TU Müchen Emmanuel Filiot, Univerté Libre de Bruxelles Zeinab Galal, Kyoto University Shankaranarayanan Krishna, IIT Bombay Ugo dal Lago, University of Bologna Nathan Lhote, Aix-Marseille University Christof Löding, Aachen Uniersity Rupak Majumdar, MPI-SWS Tito Nguyen, CNRS, Aix-Marseille University Karin Quaas, Leipzig University Ocan Sankur, CNRS, Rennes University ### ORGANISING COMMITTEE Laura Kovacs, TU Wien c/o WPI Michael Sammler, ISTA ### STEERING COMMITTEE - Antoine Amarilli (environmental chair) - León Bohn (webmaster) - Antonio Casares - Supratik Chakraborty - Thomas Colcombet (chair) - Bartek Klin - K. S. Thejaswini (publicity chair) - Sophie Tison