Sunday, May 27, 2012

Lua at Rearden, 14 March, 2012


Roberto was Tinker Professor in Stanford at the beginning of the year, which was wonderful. Had great dinners with Noemi, Roberto  and Ana Lucia and when the girls went home, had several other opportunities to drink wine and talk shop with Roberto. I would like to know more about Lua.

So I invited Roberto to give a  Rearden University presentation in March. His abstract, with a link to his slides.

About Lua

Lua is a programming language developed at the Catholic University
in Rio de Janeiro that came to be the leading scripting language in
video games. Lua is also used extensively in embedded devices, such as
set-top boxes and TVs, and other applications like Adobe Lightroom and
Wikipedia. In this talk we will see where Lua is being used, why Lua is
being used, and what makes Lua special.

Roberto Ierusalimschy is Associate Professor at the Pontifical Catholic
University in Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and the leading architect of the
Lua programming language. Currently he is a Tinker Visiting Professor
at Stanford.


They're having their workshop this November at Verisign.

15th SLALM, Bogota, Colombia coming soon...



I was amazed that the serious and mostly model theoretical  logicians organizing the 15th Simposio Latino Americano de Logica Matematica (Latin American Mathematical Logic Symposium), started by no other than Abraham Robinson and supported by the ASL (The Association for Symbolic Logic), decided to invite me to be a Plenary Speaker. I was so amazed that I said yes.

Now I worry about how not to squander this opportunity to tell them all about the wonders of Categorical Logic.

Women of Vision: Anita Borg's Award Dinner, May, 10, 2012



My friends at Santa Clara University invited me to the Anita Borg's Institute Women of Vision Awards dinner. Again. This is so nice of them!

I loved the awards dinner the three times that I've been invited to. It's amazing to see the amount of energy and good buzz created by almost 800 women who love technology. (On the other hand one always ends up feeling a little inadequate, I must say...)

One of the most exciting things I learnt about was in my own table, The Frugal Innovation Lab. Need to find a way to collaborate with them!

Symposium on Empowering Digital Self Determination: MediaX Stanford, 9 May, 20129

Thanks to my friend Jessica, I got invited to the MediaX symposium and had a great time.
Great discussions and met many interesting people, as well as seeing some old friends. I cannot find their schedule online. So I will have to write down sometime later the papers that I want to read, from the handout.

Infinite Possibilities Conference, UMBC, Maryland, March 2012



I was very chuffed at being asked to be a Plenary Speaker at IPC2012.
It was great fun seeing so many young women  who love mathematics.
Their  stories were inspiring too.

I gave one short talk about becoming a mathematician and one plenary on "Edwardian Proofs for Futuristic Programs". I need to write a blog post about why I chose this theme.

I was also very humbled by meeting the women that started many of the movements to get us the AWM and other support associations. But the cherry on the top was hanging out with my friend Rehana that I hadn't seen in quite a few years.

2nd Set Theory and General Topology Week, Salvador, March 2012

So, I have lost access to my webpage in Bham and I have issues with my valeria.depaiva.org webpage.
I need to take some time to sort out my stuff, I know. But I don't have the time right now.
So posting here  stuff that I have been doing, just so I don't lose it.
The presenting year started with a bang in Salvador, Bahia.
The webpage for the event.
I gave two talks, slides are in slideshare.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Too many grammar formalisms, too many semantic systems...





Need a clear presentation of the possibilities and if possible how to combine them.
Something like the menu above, from Erin Jang.


Also Avery Andrews has written quite a bit about Glue Semantics. In particular he has a 64-pages long tutorial entitled "Yet Another Attempt to Explain Glue", dated Mar 13, 2010 which one wonders might render useless my attempt here. But maybe not, as I expect his tutorial is written for linguists, a very different audience.

Glue Semantics for Logicians?

So a long, long time ago I was invited by Claudia Casadio to talk about Linear Logic and Natural Language Semantics. I thought I'd like to discuss Glue Semantics, as I think it's a very exciting and different application of Linear Logic that linear logicians know nothing about. But I ended up not being able to go to Rome, so I never wrote down my thoughts.

Since I'm trying to reconstruct those mostly forgotten ideas, I thought it might be sensible to use a blog to record links, add files and discussions, etc. It doesn't help that the PARC pages also do not exist anymore, with Mary Dalrymple moving to Oxford, John Lamping moving to PurpleYogi and then Google, Vineet Gupta also to Google and Dick Crouch to Powerset and then Microsoft.

At least three people wrote phd theses related  to Glue Semantics:
 Ash Asudeh, Iddo Lev and Miltiadis Kokkonidis.
(Kokkonidis also maintains (maintained?) the Glue Semantics bibliography, initiated by Lev.)