Editing books

The picture above is what Amazon knows about the books I've edited. There are a few other things, (e.g. special issues of journals), but of course Amazon doesn't sell them, so they wouldn't know about those. Now anyone in the least competent would have their edited books as part of their curriculum and webpage, right? Oh well, I'm failing this test too, so far. Need to add them.

Actually, Amazon also knows about the cover of the last book above, first edition in 1993, re-issued as a paperback in 2006.

Now for special issues, I guess I need to create my own picture.

The curious incident of the dropped streaming

This is a picture of zoom minutes before Women in Logic 2020, the workshop associated with FSCD/IJCAR, started on 30 June 2020. This year I am *not* one of the organizers of "Women in Logic".

I had promised myself to try to do it for three years and then pass on the ball. I was thrilled to be able to pass the ball to the very competent hands of Sandra Alves, Sandra Kiefer and Ana Sokolova, the organizers this year! They did a splendid job and the workshop had 145 attendees during these trying pandemic times, a wonderful feat, if you ask me.

But we had a bit of an incident during Women in Logic 2020 this time. The workshop was going really well, when during Alexandra Silva's Invited talk ("An algebraic framework to reason about concurrency"), my chat started blipping with the organizers of FSCD/IJCAR asking "what's going on on your workshop? everything ok? YouTube took down the streaming!!! they say someone complained about the workshop". What?

I explained that there was nothing wrong happening, no zoom bombing, no glitches that we (me or the real organizers) could see, and urged them to complain to YT to get the stream back up again. YouTube eventually restarted the stream again (the next day--the workshop was one day only) and sent an unapologetic message, see below.

So yes, we don't know at all what happened. If they thought there was a trademark infringement or if some human being triggered the complaints procedure to annoy us. (some of our friends seem to think that the latter was the case!)

We have some reasons to believe that this was a childish act of sabotage:  because Alexandra had finished the CS part of her presentation and had started the discussion on why we need meetings like "Women in Logic". Initially firmly convinced that it was some sort of glitch of automatic algorithms I took on to Twitter and asked:

OK, a small typo in "down", but nothing too controversial.  Belnap's lattice, Kleene algebras and nominal type theory are perfectly good subjects in logic and computer science. The workshop was running on Zoom and was been streamed on YouTube, so the meeting carried on with further talks and a discussion at the end. But the reason for streaming the meeting was to support also people who didn't want to use zoom, and these people could not participate then.

Quite a number of people responded to my tweet.  Ian Stark asked "Do you get any indication of what YouTube judge you've infringed?" and we were told that something similar happened with POPL2019, so I wrote to Fritz Henglein to ask for information. (there wasn't much info to be had)

Sara Kalvala commented "It is completely bizarre that anyone would feel threatened by a bunch of women having a workshop on logic and complain to @youtube. Even more bizarre that @youtube would delete the video. But it won't stop us having more meetings". To this I replied "yes, totally bizarre! a small correction is that YT didn't delete the video, they simply took down the streaming. Since stopping the streaming is immediate, but reinstatement takes lots of human intervention, they put it back the next day, but the workshop was one day only!".

Anyways a small consolation (for me) was to see the comments from colleagues in FSCD/IJCAR saying "I thought you were exaggerating, guess you're right and doing the right thing!! Keep doing it!!".

And yes, I think we are doing the right thing. To begin with I was a little skeptical. I am used to being in a very masculine world, a world of very few women. I `grew up' in research being treated like one of the "lads" and not worrying too much about it. I was expecting things to improve, as numbers of women improved. But the numbers of women in logic and Computer Science not only did not improve, some of them got decidedly much worse.

Many of  the young women finishing PhDs in CS I talked to feel that a place like "Women in Logic"  made them feel less attacked, more protected and better able to speak and be themselves. And the fact that many of our sisters have been doing these meetings for more than twelve years (e.g.Women in Machine Learning,  Women in Machine Learning and Data Science,  Women in Biology, etc), with huge numbers in attendance, showed me  that I was wrong, that meetings where only women present work are sensible and helpful and a "good thing" altogether.

Slideshare is my friend. Sometimes.

When I first had  issues with Google sites, Slideshare turned out to be an easy place to add pdfs of  slides to (btw I still have issues with Google sites, still need to find a few hours to try to debug what's wrong with my old webpage!)

 I wish I had made more use of slideshare all along, as by now I have no idea where most of my powerpoint talks are. I hope they are somewhere between my dropbox, my Google Drive storage, my Apple storage, or any of the four hard drives sitting on my desk. But yes trying to find anything at all in all these possible places is quite hard. While the Slideshare stuff is easy to find.

I can see that this year, so far, I have given five talks -- actually I have given 6, as I have forgotten to add the slides for "Logicians in Quarantine", as they were very similar indeed to the ones for SRI. I can see that I need some change in my beamer style -- which is lovely and matches well my favorite PowerPoint template, so I can import between the platforms. But you can have too much of a good thing like pale purplish-blue! and I swear that it took me much more than 3 hours to get those slides uploaded. because one deck had a glitch and insisted on failing its upload over and over again.

Anyways some effort will be happening here to recover the talks and the writings associated with them. Because, yes, I am failing miserably this year on my "just ship it" approach to paper writing. We're at the end of July, so I needed to have 7 papers submitted (yes, we cannot guarantee acceptance, but we can make sure that submission is done!). Instead, I have one paper to appear with Paul Tarau and one submitted with Samuel Gomes da Silva. Definitely not good! need to change that asap.

Logicians in Quarantine

 This post is a short shout-out to Bruno Lopes and Petrucio Viana for the brilliant idea of creating "Logicians in Quarantine/Logicos em Quarentena" the Brazilian Logic Society online seminar.  I was invited to help to bootstrap it and I gave the second talk,  "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Structural and Distributional Meaning representations", mostly because I had just given this talk at SRI Menlo Park (on 5th March), so it was ready. But also because I wanted to show to my Brazilian friends how my work with language does connect to my work with logic. The transition is not so obvious. 

Joao Marcos gave the first talk "On classes of structures axiomatizable by universal d-Horn sentences and universal positive distinctions".  The seminar seems to be working extremely well, with all sorts of interesting talks. These are recorded, so if something happens, you can always watch it later on. 

The seminar is now part of the Logic SuperGroup another splendid idea! many kudos to Shay Logan, Shawn Standefer, and many others for the brilliant implementation of the idea of connecting all the logic seminars.

Crazy Bird in Pandemic

This crazy bird has been fighting its own image in my bathroom window every day since the beginning of the pandemic, starting around 5:30 am. Every single day. A series of thumps, when it tries to fight itself and loses the fight against itself, several times a day. Yes, a whole series of new self-defeating metaphors is always unfolding on my mind when I wake up to this inglorious battle.

We've tried everything to dissuade it from attacking its own image, the only thing that worked was covering the whole window in Manila paper. I thought that high summer would calm it down and took the Manila paper off. oh well, it hasn't worked at all.

By now I am fairly convinced that one of the non-existent Deities on Duty has decided that I do have to live through this bird's nightmare, as a form of punishment. please send comforting thoughts!

Choices during a pandemic

Many people are noticing how, instead of feeling less tired, as they do not have to commute to work, the lockdown, the social-distancing, and working from home, is making people more stressed out, more tired than before. While the reasons for this may be obvious for people with little children, it is not so clear why the same would happen to others.

Clearly, some are making bad choices. And whenever choices can be made, I can count on myself to make the bad ones: it's a natural knack I have. But it's also a consequence of the lifestyle of forever acquiring new scientific interests and not letting go of the old ones.

So I thought I wouldn't accept many reviews this year. However, I ended up in the program committees of the ACL2020, AAAI2020, IJCAI2020, ICALP2020, LICS2020, COLING2020, EMNLP2020, as well as organizing  Linearity and TLLA, mentoring at the ACT Summer School and helping out with Women in Logic 2020 and the ACT conference, as well as serving on the thesis committee of Pierre Pradic, phew!!! So this made for three very intense weeks that just went by!

Pierre  wrote a beautiful thesis called "Some proof-theoretical approaches to Monadic Second-Order logic" which uses ideas from Dialectica categories. I hope to come back to his work soon! 

This week I also had a talk in the Melbourne Logic Seminar on ``Dialectica Models of the Lambek Calculus", invited by Shawn Standefer. Thanks Shawn!