Its purpose is to bring together members of the academic, research, and industrial community who have an interest in the theory, implementation, and application of automata and related structures.
In 2000, the conference grew out of the Workshop on Implementation of Automata (WIA).
Like most theoretical computer science conferences its contributions are strongly peer-reviewed; the articles appear in proceedings published in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Extended versions of selected papers of each year's conference alternatingly appear in the journals Theoretical Computer Science and International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science.
Since the focus of the conference is on applied theory, contributions usually come from a widespread range of application domains.