Invited Talks are Fun. Maybe.

I like talking. About work, about politics, about friendship, chit-chat or deep-issues, all are welcome and part of my repertoire.

But yeah, it's especially nice when people ask you to talk about your work. You don't have to submit something and wait for others to decide whether they like it or not, whether they think it's important or not. It's your invited talk, you can do whatever you want. Or so I say.

I feel very lucky to have been invited to talk about my work in a series of occasions. I have a very non-linear working career, with lots of  chop and changing along the way, which, I hope, makes for interesting talks. But clearly also means I don't have all the accolades of the profession. I am, in some sense, still a junior, still hungry to do more work, still not established enough. sigh..

But I digress: the reason I wanted to write this blog post was to remind myself of the other invited talks I've given, to make sure the message I really think it's important is not getting lost in the middle of my own confused mind. That place is a jungle, everything gets lost in there.

I notice that in the curriculum vitae in my webpage from 2016, I kind of list the following invited talks:

1. Weapons of Math Construction, LICS Logic Mentoring Workshop,  Iceland, 2017.
2. Intuitionistic Modal Logic: a personal view, Stanford Logic Seminar, Stanford, CA, USA, 2016
3. Modal Type Theory, Logical and Semantic Frameworks with Applications (LSFA) 2015, Natal, Brazil.
4. Lean Logic for Lean Times: Varieties of Natural Logic, Conference on Computing Natural Reasoning (CoCoNat), Bloomington, Indiana, US, 2015
5. Lean Logic for Lean times: Entailment and Contradiction (ECD) Revisited, 4th CSLI Workshop on Logic, Rationality & Intelligent Interaction, Stanford, CA, US.
6. Intuitionistic Modal Logic: 15 years later, Berkeley Logic Colloquium, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2015.
7. Edwardian Proofs for Futuristic Programs and Personal Assistants,  Plenary Talk, North American Annual Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, Boulder, CO, USA, 2014.
8. Dialectica categories’ surprising application – mapping cardinal invariants, XV Latin American Symposium on Mathematical Logic (SLALM 2012), Bogotá, Colômbia, 2012
9. Edwardian Proofs for Futuristic Programs, Invited Plenary Talk at Infinite Possibilities Conference, IPC2012, Baltimore, Maryland, 2012.
10. A Bridge not too far, SRI AI Seminar, Menlo Park, CA, 2010. 
11. Fibrational Versions of Dialectica Categories.Talk at Stanford Logic Seminar, 2010
12. CLiCS: Categorical Logic in Computer Science, Talk at  M*A*T*H Colloquium, Sonoma State University, 2009.
13. Adventures in SearchLand, PARC Forum, Palo Alto, CA, 2009
14. Constructive Hybrid Logics and Contexts, Hybrid Logic, Seattle, WA, 2006.
15. Dialectica Categories: a survey Logic Lunch Stanford, 1999.
16. Explicit Linear Substitutions,  WoLLIC Sao Paulo, Brazil,  1998. 

Some are more prestigious than others.
I am very proud of having spoken at Infinity Possibilities and the two ASL meetings (Boulder and Bogota). and also especially of the Berkeley Logic Colloquium, where I wanted to ask autographs of the guys in the audience: William Craig, Dana Scott, Paolo Mancuso, John Steel,...
But the hardest was definitely talking about Dialectica categories to Sol Feferman and Grisha Mints when I first arrived in the Bay Area. I miss them!