News

2009/02/19	ForestFIRE and FIREWood, a toolkit and GUI for regular tree algorithms and tree automata, are now available for download. The toolkit and GUI were developed for the PhD research of Dr Loek Cleophas, which was on classification and implementation of algorithms related to tree pattern matching, tree acceptance, and tree parsing.
2009/01/03	The FASTAR group is hosting the eight international workshop on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP). FSMNLP 2009 will be held in Pretoria, South Africa on 21-24 July 2009. This year FSMNLP is merged with the FASTAR workshop once again. Official website. We encourage you to submit papers and attend the workshop!
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.
2007/03/12	The list of upcoming events (workshops, conferences etc.) has once again been updated, see Events in the menu. Events added or for which additional information was added include this year's CIAA, FSMNLP, SPIRE, and ISAAC.
2006/07/28	Two papers by FASTAR members were accepted to SAICSIT 2006, to be held October 9-11 in the Cape Winelands, South Africa: Ernest Ketcha Ngassam, Derrick G. Kourie and Bruce W. Watson, A Taxonomy of DFA-based String Processors. Corne de Ridder, Derrick G. Kourie and Bruce W. Watson, FiremuSat: Meeting the challenge of detecting microsatellites in DNA.
2006/06/30	Four papers by FASTAR members were recently accepted to PSC 2006, to be held August 28-30 in Prague, Czech Republic: Tinus Strauss, Derrick G. Kourie and Bruce W Watson, A concurrent specification of Brzozowski's DFA construction algorithm. Bruce W. Watson, Derrick G. Kourie, Ernest Ketcha, Tinus Strauss and Loek Cleophas, Efficient Automata Constructions and Approximate Automata. Ernest Ketcha Ngassam, Derrick G. Kourie and Bruce Watson, On Implementation and Performance of Table-driven DFA-based String Processors. Corne De Ridder, Derrick G. Kourie and Bruce W. Watson, FIREmuSat: An Algorithm to Detect Microsatellites in DNA.
2005/10/04	The FASTAR and Espresso research groups recently organized a workshop, directly following the SAICSIT 2005 conference in White River, Mpumalanga, South Africa. On September 22nd and 23rd, about twenty-five presentations were given by FASTAR and Espresso MSc and PhD students, as well as staff members. The Espresso related presentations will be made available on http://espresso.cs.up.ac.za (from within the University of Pretoria's network) and http://www.espresso-soft.org (from outside the UP network). FASTAR related presentations are gradually becoming available for download on this site, see Publications -> Presentations.
2005/08/23	Martijn van de Rijdt succesfully defended his MSc thesis results at the TU/e in Eindhoven today. His thesis work was done under the supervision of prof.dr. Bruce Watson and dr. Gerard Zwaan. The thesis, titled `Two-dimensional Pattern Matching', is now available for download. See Publications -> Theses / Internship Reports for more information. Martijn's presentation slides are also available, see Publications -> Presentations. Martijn has since graduated and received his MSc degree in CS. Congratulations to him!
2005/04/13	After succesfuly defending their MSc thesis results in the past weeks, Michiel Frishert and Remi Bosman graduated yesterday, both receiving their MSc cum laude. Congratulations to both of them!
2005/04/05	Remi Bosman succesfully defended his MSc thesis results at the TU/e in Eindhoven today. His thesis work was done under the supervision of prof.dr. Bruce Watson and dr. Gerard Zwaan. The thesis, titled `A Taxonomy of Approximate Pattern Matching Algorithms in strings', is now available for download. See Publications -> Theses / Internship Reports for more information.
2005/03/29	Michiel Frishert succesfully presented and defended his MSc thesis results to the audience in Eindhoven via video/phone conference from Berkeley, CA, USA on March 21st. His thesis `FIRE Works & FIRE Station a Finite Automata & Regular Expression Playground' is now available for download. See Publications -> Theses / Internship Reports for more information. Based on his succesful defense and courses completed, Michiel is expected to receive his MSc degree on April 12.
2005/03/23	Prof. Fatholahzadeh found two errors in examples used in his paper "Compact Representation of a Set of String-Classes" as published in the Proceedings of the Eindhoven FASTAR Days 2004 (pages 164-179 of the PDF version) and wrote a corrigendum.
2005/02/24	Loek Cleophas and Bruce Watson just had a paper on SPARE Time as a case study of the TABASCO-approach published in IEE Proceedings Software. Loek G.W.A. Cleophas and Bruce W. Watson. SPARE Parts: a C++ toolkit for string pattern recognition. IEE Proceedings Software, 152(1):29-37, IEE, February 2005. See Publications -> Journal Articles for more information and a link to the article, and Projects -> SPARE Time / SPARE Parts 2003 for more information on the toolkit.
2005/02/07	A list of upcoming events (workshops, conferences etc.) has been added to the website, see Events in the menu.
2005/01/31	Paper copies of the Proceedings of the Eindhoven FASTAR Days 2004, TU/e CS TR 04-40, have been sent out to participants and authors. If you are not among those people yet would like to receive a copy, please send an e-mail to proceedings@fastar.org.
2004/12/17	The Proceedings of the Eindhoven FASTAR Days 2004 have been accepted as a technical report of the Department of Mathematics & Computer Science of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. For more information and a digital version in PDF format see Publications -> Technical Reports. Paper copies will likely be available in January of 2005.
2004/10/26	Noud de Beijer received his MSc degree at Eindhoven in September 2004, after succesfully presenting and defending his thesis results during the Eindhoven FASTAR Days 2004. His thesis on Stretching and Jamming of Automata is now available for download. See Publications -> Theses / Internship Reports for more information.
2004/09/04	The Software Construction Group at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e) successfully hosted the first annual Eindhoven FASTAR Days (EFD) on Friday and Saturday 3/4 September 2004. Over 30 participants from the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Poland and South-Africa attended this workshop focused on Finite State Systems. Of the participants, 18 presented current research results related to such systems and their applications. Connected to the event, a number of meetings were held in the week of September 6 - 10 to further cooperation between the participants, including possibilities of co-authoring papers, student research projects and student or staff exchanges.
2004/07/02	Loek Cleophas, Bruce Watson and Gerard Zwaan have had a paper (`Automaton-based sublinear keyword pattern matching') accepted to SPIRE 2004, to be held October 5-8 in Padova, Italy.
2004/06/28	Important Note: The e-mail address for abstract submission for the Eindhoven FASTAR Days is efd-talks@fastar.org, not efd-talks@faster.org as incorrectly stated in the Update to the Call for Participation sent out by e-mail.
2004/06/16	The FASTAR research group is organizing a workshop in Eindhoven, the Eindhoven FASTAR Days 2004. See EFD 2004 for more information.
2004/06/08	Ernest Ketcha Ngassam, Bruce Watson and Derrick Kourie have had a paper (`A Framework for the Dynamic Implementation of Finite Automata for Performance Enhancement') accepted to PSC 2004, to be held August 30-September 1 in Prague, Czech Republic.
2004/06/01	Bruce Watson and Loek Cleophas just had a paper on SPARE Parts 2003 (the new version of the string pattern matching toolkit) published in SP&E: Bruce W. Watson and Loek Cleophas. SPARE Parts: a C++ toolkit for string pattern recognition. Software---Practice & Experience, 34(7):697-710, John Wiley & Sons, June 2004. See Publications -> Journal Articles for more information and a link to the article, and Projects -> SPARE Time / SPARE Parts 2003 for more information on the toolkit.
2004/05/27	SPARE Parts 2003, the updated and revised version of our toolkit of single and multiple keyword pattern matching algorithms, is available for download. See Projects -> SPARE Time / SPARE Parts 2003 for more information.
2004/05/27	Michiel Frishert and Bruce Watson have had a poster paper (`Combining regular expressions with (near-)optimal Brzozowski automata') accepted to CIAA 2004, to be held July 22-24 in Kingston, ON, Canada. In addition, Michiel, Bruce and Loek Cleophas have had a full paper (`FIRE Station: An environment for manipulating finite automata and regular expression views') accepted to the same conference. Bruce and Loek will be attending this conference, giving us a chance to highlight the FASTAR group's research.