Skype Talk in May: Round Table at EBL

I couldn't go to the Encontro Brasileiro de Logica (EBL) in Joao Pessoa this year. I wanted to, as I went to the last one in Paraiba, too many years ago, and had a great time.

This time we (Gisele Secco, Elaine Pimentel, Claudia Nalon and myself) had offered to organize a round table about Women in Logic. And so we did, yay! I spoke over Skype, not the best medium, but what can be done, can be done.

We hope to have a text about it written sometime soon. Meanwhile, slides are in slideshare.https://www.slideshare.net/valeria.depaiva/mulheres-na-logica-e-no-brasil

BACAT2019: Petri nets rewind

This  only appeared briefly in twitter.

A total contrast between  Santa Clara at 7 pm in February and at 7 pm in June.

A great discussion on Petri nets, using the Dialectica construction.

Slides are in slideshare. Somehow the questions became about pros and cons of dialectica versus Chu construction, I mentioned Dialectica and Chu constructions: cousins,  (Theory and Applications of Categories, vol 17 Issue 7, pages 127-152, 2007) because I have always wanted a "Dialectica Calculator", like the "Chu calculator" Vaughan Pratt has. But I realized that the line "there are pros and cons to both" is not very informative. I need to go back to that.

One of the reasons I still want to write about Petri nets, using the dialectica model is because I hope that morphisms that are simulations, instead of bisimulations or other more strict maps, might be more useful in practice. (Need to find a way of checking on this properly)

But then I got thinking that the mathematics of Chu construction is somewhat easier, as more symmetric, so maybe those Petri nets make sense too?

Vancouver in June

We had Women in Logic 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
There are some photos in FB's group Women in Logic.
It was a neck-breaking speedy trip, I was in Vancouver for one night only, but well worth it.
The meeting was smaller than the one in Oxford last year, as expected. FLoC does encourage lots of people to come, who wouldn't otherwise.

But the meeting was very productive with decisions taken, committees organized, bold plans for 2020. Also a general feeling that we can do this together and it will be just fine! Very grateful for that. I was worried about (not) missing my plane back home (I almost missed it going out), so didn't have much time to enjoy the brewery, but had plenty of good conversations over sushi at lunchtime.

  Another lesson learned is that for a short workshop is very important to plan the social events in advance.  It worked well for us, we found good restaurants close by, but it should've been announced earlier on. We almost missed Ana Sokolova!

But all's well that ends well, we were all seated for beer eventually.

Tuebingen in March

I had an amazing time in Tuebingen in March. The meeting was fantastic! Thanks Peter Schroeder-Heister and Thomas Piecha for a great programme, excellent accommodations and an amazingly beautiful place. Having  just started at Samsung Research America two weeks earlier, I was a bit worried about flying off, but I had   bargained for the trip,  and all was fine.

Farewell to Prof Troelstra

This year has, so far, being complicated with a somewhat traumatic job move, from Nuance to Samsung Research America. I started in Samsung in  March 2019 and hence have not had the time to grieve properly over the departure of Prof Anne Troelstra in March 2019, after a brief illness. The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam has an obituary for him and several condolence messages. Personally I knew and admired Prof Troelstra very much. I was invited once by him to Amsterdam to discuss logic and, yes, he could be very intimidating, but once you got over that, he was a very generous mathematician. Someone you could ask questions and trust the answers. Someone who, over a blackboard, would treat you as if you were a colleague, instead of a mere  phd student starting to think about things. Someone willing to entertain very different ideas, at least for the time of the discussion. 
Rest in power, Anne!

Together with Grigori Mints,  Solomon Feferman, Danny Bobrow and Aurelio Carboni, another mentor lost.