DCFS 2026: 27th International Conference on Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems Queen's University Kingston, Canada, August 9-11, 2026

DCFS 2026 will be held in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, on August 9-11, 2026. The conference is organized jointly by the School of Computing at Queen's University and by the IFIP Working Group 1.02 "Descriptional Complexity".

The conference will be co-located with CIAA 2026 (August 5-8, 2026).

The International Conference on Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems (DCFS) is an annual international working conference concerning the descriptional complexity of formal systems and structures (and its applications). The website of the conference series is:

https://www.informatik.uni-giessen.de/dcfs/

Submission Guidelines

Submissions to DCFS must not exceed 12 pages (in Springer-Verlag’s Lecture Notes style, excluding the bibliography). If the authors believe that more details are essential to substantiate the main claims, they may include a clearly marked appendix, which will be read at the discretion of the program committee. However, if slightly longer submissions are deemed necessary, authors must contact the program committee chairs in advance for approval.

Simultaneous submissions of papers to any other conference with published proceedings or submitting previously published papers is not allowed. Only electronic submissions in the PDF format are accepted. Papers should be submitted electronically through the EasyChair system at this link:

https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=dcfs2026

The proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

Special Issue

Extended versions of selected papers from the conference will be invited for consideration in a special issue of International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science (IJFCS).

Principal Topics

Submissions concerning the descriptional complexity of formal systems and structures (and its applications) are invited for DCFS 2026. Original papers are sought in all aspects of descriptional complexity. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Automata, grammars, languages and other formal systems; various modes of operations and complexity measures.
• Succinctness of description of objects, state-explosion-like phenomena.
• Circuit complexity of Boolean functions and related measures.
• Size complexity of formal systems.
• Structural complexity of formal systems.
• Trade-offs between computational models and mode of operation.
• Applications of formal systems-- for instance in software and hardware testing, in dialogue systems, in systems modeling or in modeling natural languages-- and their complexity constraints.
• Co-operating formal systems.
• Size or structural complexity of formal systems for modeling natural languages.
• Complexity aspects related to the combinatorics of words.
• Descriptional complexity in resource-bounded or structure-bounded environments.
• Structural complexity as related to descriptional complexity.
• Frontiers between decidability and undecidability.
• Universality and reversibility.
• Nature-motivated (bio-inspired) architectures and unconventional models of computing.
• Blum Static (Kolmogorov/Chaitin) complexity, algorithmic information.

Invited Speakers

[ To be announced ]

Program Committee

• Marie-Pierre Béal (Université Gustave Eiffel, France)
• Cezar Câmpeanu (University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, co-chair)
• Pamela Fleischmann (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany)
• Dora Giammarresi (Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Italy)
• Yo-Sub Han (Yonsei University, South Korea)
• Markus Holzer (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany)
• Galina Jirásková (Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia)
• Stavros Konstantinidis (Saint Mary's University, Canada)
• Martin Kutrib (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany)
• Andreas Malcher (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany)
• Ian McQuillan (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
• Nelma Moreira (Universidade do Porto, Portugal)
• Luca Prigioniero (Loughborough University, UK, co-chair)
• Rogério Reis (Universidade do Porto, Portugal)
• Kai Salomaa (Queen's University, Canada)
• Shinnosuke Seki (University of Electro-Communications, Japan)
• Taylor J. Smith (St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, co-chair)
• Gyorgy Vaszil (Debreceni Egyetem, Hungary)

Organizing Committee

• Salimur Choudhury (Queen's University, Canada, chair)

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline: March 13, 2026
• Author notification: April 17, 2026
• Camera-ready deadline: May 1, 2026
• Conference: August 9-11, 2026

Contact

• Email: dcfs2026@cs.queensu.ca
• Website: https://research.cs.queensu.ca/dcfs2026/