Automata theory is the foundation of computer science. Its applications have spread to almost all areas of computer science and many other disciplines.
In addition, there is a growing number of software systems designed to manipulate automata, regular expressions, grammars, and related structures; examples include AGL, AMORE, Automate, FADELA, FinITE, FireLite, FLAP, FSM, Grail, INR, Intex, ASTL, MONA and Turing's World.

The purpose of these conferences is to bring together members of the academic, research and industrial community who have an interest in implementation and application of automata to demonstrate and analyze their work and to explain the problems they have been solving.