It will be my great pleasure and honour to edit the Automata Column in the SIGLOG Newsletter. Here is my first proposal: an admireable article by Shaull Almagor on recent breakthrough results concerning determinisation of tropical weighted automata.
POPL (Principles of Programming Languages) took place from January 11 to 17 in Rennes, the capital city of Brittany in France, bringing together about 700 attendees from 38 countries over seven days. The conference took place at the Jacobins Convent in the city center of Rennes, a historic site that has been recently renovated and converted into a convention center.
Dear Colleagues, The letter from the chair this time comes from not one, but two chairs. This is because we are in the process of transition. Catuscia Palamidessi is stepping down from the role of SIGLOG chair after years of important service. As Catuscia reported in the January issue of this newsletter, the financial crisis that had preoccupied us for some time has been resolved with an agreement with ACM that balances the SIGLOG overhead charges with its income from the ACM digital library. With this difficulty behind us, it is time to look forward and rebuild SIGLOG. With this in mind, a nominating committee chaired by Moshe Vardi proposed Anuj Dawar for the role of chair and Prakash Panangaden for the role of vice-chair. They stepped into these roles in May 2026. Sandra Alves and Elaine Pimentel continue in their roles as Secretary and Treasurer respectively.
We survey the history of the determinizability problem for min-plus (tropical) weighted automata. Traditional automata accept or reject their input, and are therefore Boolean, in the sense that their language is a function L : Σ * → {0, 1}. They are well-understood, and have provided the theoretical basis for many applications, most notably in formal verification. However, today's rich systems and properties are often unsuitable to model with Boolean models, mostly due to the presence of quantitative elements, such as energy, probability, counters, etc.
April 2026 edition of SIGLOG Monthly, featuring deadlines, calls and community announcements.
