The refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata, CIAA 2002, held in Tours, France, in July 2002. The 28 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper and 4 short papers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The topics addressed range from theoretical and methodological issues to automata applications in software engineering, natural language processing, speech recognition, and image processing, to new representations and algorithms for efficient implementation of automata and related structures.