This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2026, held in Ghent, Belgium, during July 6–11, 2026.

The 13 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Theoretical Foundations; Unconventional Computing and Control; Cryptography and Data Science; Applications.