From Monday the 15th of June 2026 to Friday the 19th of the same month, in Warsaw (Poland), the SAMSA workshop took place. It is a rather small workshop on Series, Automata, Matrices and Symbolic dynamics, and their Applications, with a focus on the interactions between these topics.
It was the second edition of the SAMSA Workshop, that happened around the same time and at the same place as the 2025 edition of the SAMSA Workshop. This time, funding was mainly provided by Le Trójkąt CNRS International Research Project, aiming at fostering collaborations between French and Polish researchers from LaBRI (Bordeaux), IRIF (Paris), and the automata team of the University of Warsaw.
Organisation and History of the Workshop
I did not organise nor participated to the first edition of the Worshop, although being invited by Andrew Ryzhikov, since I was mostly busy applying to positions in 2025. However, I had positive feedback from participants, and was very interested in the topics of the workshop, especially as I consider myself a late bloomer in this area: I am starting to actually be interested in these connections between symbolic dynamics, more mathematical questions on semigroups of matrices, and weighted automata.
The organisation of a second edition was discussed in October 2025, after I invited Andrew to Bordeaux for a research visit. Nathanaël Fijalkow, who is the Principal investigator of Le Trójkąt CNRS International Research Project offered that this second edition could be partially funded by this project fostering collaborations between Bordeaux and Warsaw, and at this point I became a co-organiser of SAMSA 2026, supposedly to handle the "easy stuff" which is paying polish companies using French money.
Great Things !
After all the administrative headaches, the workshop did happen, and I would argue that everything was very smooth and well organised. I felt that participants could really enjoy talking about things that actually interest them, and not give short presentations for a "broader audience" (also called handwaving): people were eager to understand the details to understand connections between the different areas of theoretical computer science and mathematics represented at the workshop.
Organisers (4)
- Aliaume Lopez (myself) (INP Bordeaux, France)
- Antoni Puch (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- David Purser (University of Liverpool, UK)
- Andrew Ryzhikov (University of Warsaw, Poland)
Invited speakers (4)
- Markus Lohrey (University of Siegen, Germany)
- Filip Mazowiecki (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Michal Parnas (The Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo, Israel)
- Daniel Smertnig (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Participants with contributed talks (21)
- Peter Kostolányi (Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia)
- Yahia-Idriss Benalioua (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Roland Guttenberg (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Neha Rino (University of Warwick, UK)
- Corto Mascle (MPI-SWS, Kaiserslautern, Germany)
- Richard Mandel (Queen Mary University of London)
- Reinis Cirpons (Inria, Nantes, France)
- Lorenzo Clemente (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Aliaume Lopez (INP Bordeaux, France)
- Subbarao Venkatesh Guggilam (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Jakub Byszewski (Jagiellonian University, Poland)
- Mai-Linh Trân-Công (University of Lorraine, France)
- Erdenebayar Bayarmagnai (KU Leuven, Belgium)
- Igor Rystsov (National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute", Ukraine)
- Piotr Bacik (University of Oxford, UK and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarbrücken, Germany)
- George Kenison (Maynooth University, Ireland)
- Vincent Ghigo (University of Bordeaux, France)
- S Hitarth (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarbrücken, Germany)
- Jakub Kaszycki (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Nikhil Balaji (IIT Delhi, India)
- Matthew Konefal (Loughborough University, UK)
Attendees (7)
- Lukasz Kaminski (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Lukasz Orlikowski (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Clotilde Biziere (University of Bordeaux, CNRS, Bordeaux INP, LaBRI and University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Ismael Jecker (Université de Franche-Comté)
- Kacper Lewandowski (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Wojtek Czerwinski (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Maria Drążkiewicz (University of Warsaw, Poland)
The pain of administration
This blog post cannot end without talking about the incommensurable pain of making France and Poland agree on administrative procedures. There will be a separate post about this, but suffices to say that it took several full months (remember that we started to organise this in late October 2025) and the incessant work of myself and Antoni Puch to make the workshop happen. Would you believe that as I write this post, no one has been paid yet and we were happy that we could convince catering companies and the University of Warsaw (shoutout to Mateusz on the MIMUW side) to advance money...
The latest of all jokes being that France is cutting CNRS fundings to the point that it may be that no one will even be paid ...? Stay tuned.