Mission Statement

The FASTAR (Finite Automata Systems --- Theoretical and Applied Research) group aims to be the leading international research group in all areas related to finite state systems. Our work includes both core and applied parts of this field. The core concepts include: finite automata, regular expressions, pattern matchers, parsers, transducers, algorithms operating on these object, and data-structures. The applied areas in FASTAR are particularly broad, and encompass: text indexing, computational linguistics, bioinformatics/computational genetics, network security and intrusion detection, programming languages and compilers, communicating concurrent systems, modeling and control of interacting nanomachines, etc.

Latest News

2008/02/10	The seventh international workshop on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP) 2008 will be held in Ispra, Italy on 11-12 September 2008. This year FSMNLP is merged with the FASTAR workshop. More information and the call for papers. We encourage you to submit full or short papers and tool demo proposals and attend the workshop!
2007/12/12	Prof. Dr. Derrick Kourie has recently co-authored the book Coping with Continuous Change in the Business Environment - Knowledge management and knowledge management technology together with Dr. Tony Botha and Prof. Dr. Retha Snyman. The book discusses best practices for a number of knowledge management issues, proposes a new technology framework for knowledge management to position and relate the different knowledge management technologies, and is written by internationally acknowledged KM researchers and practitioners. The book is aimed at knowledge management practitioners as well as knowledge management, information science, information systems and software engineering students at undergraduate and post-graduate level. More information, including brief contents and how to order the book, is available.
2007/10/17	The FASTAR/Espresso Workshop 2007 will be held at Fort Schanskop in Pretoria, South Africa on Monday October 22 and Tuesday October 23. The program can be downloaded here.