Usually, these fundamentals consist of a course on formal languages and automata theory. Most of the time, the course is based on the computer model of the Turing machine. The Turing machine, which dates from 1936, is an adequate model of the computer as we had them in the seventies: a stand-alone machine that carries out batch processes. “However, the Turing machine is blind, deaf and dumb, and thus differs greatly from the computers we know today. I wouldn’t let a Turing machine sit behind the wheel of my car,” says Jos Baeten. Process theory, on the other hand, views a programme as a system that communicates continuously with its environment whilst running.
Jos Baeten’s new book integrates automata theory with process theory and, in addition to the classical results on languages, also covers their generalisation to communicating processes, as well as some new results.
During CONFEST 2026 in Liverpool, Jos Baeten announced his new book. CONFEST is an umbrella scientific event that brings together leading international conferences in the fields of process theory, time-bound systems and formal methods for computer science.
The book *Models of Computation based on Automata: Formal Languages and Communicating Processes* has been published as Open Access and is available in the CWI Repository.
