IMLA 2011: Nancy, France

Natasha Alechina and I decided that it was time to make an IMLA that appealed to the philosophical logicians amongst us. So we proposed a workshop associated to the  14th Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science LMPS in Nancy, France.

The program is below. This gave origin to a special issue of the IGPL that we are still trying to finish...

Programme:

8:30-8:45 - introduction Valeria and Natasha
8:45-9:30 INVITED SPEAKER: Michael Mendler
9:30-10:00 contributed paper Robert Simmons/Bernardo Toninho
10:00-10:30 COFFEE BREAK
10:30-11:15 INVITED SPEAKER: Luiz Carlos Pereira
11:15-12:00 INVITED SPEAKER: Brian Logan
12:00-12:30 contributed paper: Gianluigi Bellin
12:30 - 2:15 LUNCH BREAK
2:15 - 3:00 INVITED SPEAKER: Lutz Strassburger
3:00-3:30 contributed paper: Newton M. Peron and Marcelo E. Coniglio
3:30-4:00 contributed paper: Giuseppe Primiero
4:00-4:14  closing remarks Valeria and Natasha

IMLA 2008: Pittsburgh

Sadly this LICS was the last time I saw John Reynolds, a very nice person as well as a great fore founder of our discipline.

Here's the very colourful program of IMLA, reproduced in B&W below:

MONDAY JUNE 23 IMLA Workshop Steinberg Auditorium, Baker Hall A53
8:30-9:30 Registration
10:00-10:45 Invited Talk: Frank Pfenning
10:45-11:00 Break
11:00-11:30 Kensuke Kojima, Atsushi Igarashi:
On Constructive Linear-Time Logic
11:30-12:00 Rene Vestergaard, Pierre Lescanne, Hiroakira Ono: Constructive rationality implies backward induction for conscientious players
12:00-12:30 Simon Kramer: Reducing Provability to Knowledge in Multi-Agent Systems
12:30-2:00 Lunch
2:00-3:00 Invited Talk: Torben Brauner
3:00-3:30 Neelakantan Krishnaswami: A Modal Sequent Calculus for Propositional Separation Logic
3:30-4:00 Break
4:00-4:30 Didier Galmiche, Yakoub Salhi: Calculi for an Intuitionistic Hybrid Modal Logic
4:30-5:00 Kurt Ranalter: Two-sequent K and simple fibrations
5:00-5:30 Deepak Garg: Principal-centric Reasoning in Constructive Authorization Logic

IMLA 2005: Chicago

The Chicago version of IMLA was organized by  Frank Pfenning and myself. It was (or  perhaps, it felt) more computationally oriented than the previous two, possibly because of Frank Pfenning's influence. Here's the webpage for the workshop.

It was  very hot  in Chicago in June, 30th, 2005.

Preliminary Program:

All talks will be in the School of CTI, DePaul University, 243 South Wabash Ave. The room is TBA.
9:40		Opening Frank Pfenning, Carnegie Mellon University
9:45		INVITED TALK: Checking Properties of Pointer Programs David Walker, Princeton University
10:30		Coffee Break
11:00		A Modal Calculus for Named Control Effects Aleksandar Nanevski, Carnegie Mellon University
11:30		A Computational Interpretation of Classical S4 Modal Logic Chun-chieh Shan, Harvard University
12:00		A Term Calculus for Dual Intuitionistic Logic Gianluigi Bellin, University of Verona & QMW College, University of London
12:30		Lunch
14:00		INVITED TALK: Intuitionistic Modal Logic: observations from algebra and duality Yde Venema, University of Amsterdam
14:45		Labeling Sequents: motivations and applications Patrick Girard, Stanford University
15:15		On the inferential role semantics of modal logic Charles Stewart, Dresden University of Technology
15:30		Coffee Break
16:00		SPECIAL CONTRIBUTION: Gödel's Interpretation of Intuitionism William W. Tait, University of Chicago
16:45		Constructive Description Logics: work in progress Valeria de Paiva, PARC
17:00		End

IMLA 2002: Copenhagen

The second IMLA, the first one I helped organize, was in Copenhagen at FLoC 2002. The web site for the meeting is no longer alive. It was still alive in 2013 (when this post was first written), unlike the one for IMLA 1999, which I had to fish back from the Internet Archive. The photo which has me,  Martin Hyland and Andrea Schalk is courtesy of Elaine Pimentel. Thanks Elaine! The programme for IMLA2002 is reproduced below. The organizers were Michael Mendler, Rajeev Gore' and myself. The preliminary proceedings appeared as a technical report from Bamberg. A special issue  of the Journal of Logic and Computation,  Modalities in constructive logics and type theories, collected fully expanded and reviewed versions of the papers. ========CUT&PASTE==================== All sessions take place in auditorium 2. IMLA's program is also available with abstracts or side by side with other meetings. 08:50-10:30  Session 1 08:50   Opening 09:00   Dana Scott, Carnegie Mellon U, USA Invited talk: Realizability and modality 10:00  Steve Awodey, Carnegie Mellon U, USA and Andrej Bauer, U Ljubljana, Slovenia Propositions as [types] 10:30-11:00  Refreshments 11:00-12:30  Session 2 11:00  Claudio Hermida, IST Lisbon, Portugal A categorical outlook on relational modalities and simulations 11:30  Gianluigi Bellin, U Verona, Italy Towards a formal pragmatics: An intuitionistic theory of assertive and conjectural judgements with an extension of Gödel, McKinsey and Tarski's S4 translation. 12:00  Olivier Brunet, INRIA Rhône-Alpes, France A modal logic for observation-based knowledge representation 12:30-14:00  Lunch 14:00-15:30  Session 3 14:00  Giovanni Sambin, U Padova, Italy Invited talk: Open truth and closed falsity 15:00  J. M. Davoren, Australian National U; V. Coulthard, Australian National U; T. Moor, Australian National U; Rajeev P. Goré, Australian National U; and A. Nerode, Cornell U, USA Topological semantics for intuitionistic modal logics, and spatial discretisation by A/D maps 15:30-16:00  Refreshments 16:00-17:00  Session 4 16:00  Maria Emilia Maietti, U Padova, Italy and Eike Ritter, U Birmingham, UK Modal run-time analysis revisited 16:30 Discussion

Advances in Natural Deduction Wow...

A long, long time ago Luiz Carlos organized a great meeting in Rio to celebrate Dag Prawitz's work  and seminal book "Natural Deduction" (which is now a Dover publication, super cheap if you want a real book. if the pdf is good enough, this is also available). The original idea was to celebrate 35 years of the book, which appeared in 1965. But with the vagaries of the Brazilian funding and our own lack of organization, the meeting happened in 2001. And it was a great meeting. All worked, even the weather, the interactions were fun and people had a great time.

Then it was decided that a volume of articles would be a nice complement to the meeting and this project has been going on and on, forever, really. Since 2001, we've been fending off requests, demands, enquiries... The original publishers  Kluwer were bought, some of the authors moved institutions more than three times, all sorts of issues and delays were encountered. Several times I thought we would never get it done. But know what?
Recently, with the help of lots of friends,  mostly  Bruno Lopes, it's all done and packaged off to Springer. It looks like we will finally "tirar essa alma do purgatorio" (my granny old saying for things that look like they will never get done--literally get this soul out of the purgatory). I'm not celebrating quite yet, but glad to get a letter from Springer in India asking me where do I want my copy sent. Yay!!!

Fifty Years of Categorical Logic

Andrei Rodin and I organized a special session on Categorical Logic as part of Universal Logic 3. We also organized a special issue of Logica Universalis on the same theme. As it turns out, 2013 is the 50th anniversary of Bill Lawvere's Columbia phd thesis, possibly the best birthdate for categorical logic. So we decided to call our preface for the special issue "Elements of Categorical Logic: Fifty Years Later".

Here is this preface.

Crime and Lead: odd bedfellows

I hate when I read something quite interesting and surprising about the world and  later on, when I try to tell friends about it, I cannot find it... It happens quite a lot. Since I have this blog, I will try to keep the stuff here.
Mother Jones' writer Kevin Drum has a very, very, very interesting article on decrease of crime as it co-relates to lead in gasoline.

The essential bit for me:
Experts often suggest that crime resembles an epidemic. But what kind? Karl Smith, a professor of public economics and government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has a good rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics: If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule.

Sure, this is econometrics, a new science and a heavily disputed one. And Drum writes well, I admit that his evidence convinces me. As does the Skeptic blog post that I read next.

Being in Rio

Time flies when you're having fun. 5th day here already? well, took this picture the day I arrived, but the blog post is about not knowing what to think of the protests.
Here's an Economist short article(?) with no author. not the one I was trying to find, but better than nothing. Will try to find the Brazilian guy who I read discussing things along similar lines. Also there's Hans Rosling's GapMinder, and TED videos.

Typed Feature Structures, for Rehana

Many years ago I wanted to think about the (algebraic) structures that linguists use to describe their bits of syntax and semantics. Sometimes these are called AVMs (for attribute-value matrices), some times they are called "(typed) feature structures". They're directed acyclic graphs, rooted, and with a transition and a labelling structure. Here's the very old paper I wrote about trying to see them as purely labelled graphs.

I wanted to ask some combinatorists/graph theorists friends what they could tell me about operations on these graphs...I still want to. I hope they will say something interesting about unification in computing...