Portuguese on my mind

Marcelo Finger and Thiago Pardo

just scored high for NLP and AI in Brazil. They now head a big, new, and shining project with IBM and FAPESP  in the new center for AI, just launched in October 2020.

The picture above is from their project NLP2 Resources to Bring NLP of Portuguese to State-of-Art description in http://c4ai.inova.usp.br/nlp2-en/. 

This is great news! I have been saying and writing for over ten years now that we need lexical and semantic open-source resources for Portuguese. 

In particular, I'm very pleased because the two blue links in the picture above, both refer to my work. 

The Universal Dependencies for Portuguese is my work with Alexandre Rademaker, Fabricio Chalub, Claudia Freitas, Livy Real, and Eckhart Bick from 2017. The second blue link SICK-BR is my work with Livy Real, Ana Rodrigues, Andressa Vieira e Silva, Beatriz Albiero, Bruna Thalenberg, Bruno Guide, Cindy Silva, Guilherme de Oliveira Lima, Igor CS Câmara, Miloš Stanojević and Rodrigo Souza. 

I have mentioned to both Marcelo and Thiago that it would be nice to get our papers on their page. These are our goals too and we have been working on them for quite a while. They are working on it!

von Neuman and understanding

So the joke goes something like this: A student asked John Von Neumann when he would start understanding things. And van Neuman replied "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." 

 
I like this way of putting things. I can recall vividly all the ways things that I now hold dear in mathematics were once completely impenetrable. 

From the time I was first taught in high school about matrices and I kept asking myself and the teacher, but `what difference does it make if I write numbers on shapes or not?' It shouldn't make any difference how we lay out the numbers! To when I finally got the hang of Linear Algebra, after months of resisting it: the notion that a vector space could be defined by the properties it has, instead of by what it is. This was, mind-boggling and it still is, a little. 

More disturbing still was when I first learned about Natural Deduction from my first Logic teacher (Luiz Carlos Pereira) and I had the bad idea of telling him that I couldn't see the point of having axioms, sequents and natural deduction to define the "same" system.  It seemed to me that logicians hadn't gotten their formalizations sorted out, yet. Ah, the foolishness of youth.  Now I can see that some of this Bourbakianism of believing in "the most" perfect formalization of mathematical concepts is not only silly, it's bad for mathematics and for science in general. (also the most embarrassing detail is that Luiz Carlos told Prof Prawitz about my stupid remarks.) 

oh well, everyone knows I have very strong convictions, that is --translating-- that I am as stubborn as a mule. Mostly my stupidity is harmless, like, it took me forever to learn how to bike, because I was convinced that it was not possible for bikes to stay upright. or when I decided that people could not swim, as otherwise, why would anyone drown? Again it took me forever to learn how to swim, since I believed it was impossible to float.

But despite all my blunders, I still think that it's important to have your own ideas on the mathematical concepts you're taught and what they mean and don't mean. and whether they `have legs' (will go far or not). So I hope to re-ignite the more abstract side of this blog and to discuss a few more mathematics, while I can. The worst thing that can happen is that I am wrong. I have plenty of experience in this department.

ps: Check out the Wikipedia page on "The Martians", I had no idea all these guys were from Budapest!

Things I am proud of

 

In these times of pandemic, I (and I believe everyone else too) get depressed about what I have (not) been doing with my life: all the ways that I could be a socially more useful person and I am not. all the infinite hours that I spent fighting bugs in programs or bugs in my understanding of things, that I could and should have spent fighting the bad guys in the actual world.

So as I way to cheer myself up I thought I'd write a bit about stuff I have been doing that I think is cool, that, to put it the Marie-Kondo way, gives me joy. Funnily enough, these things are hard to put in resumes or curriculum vitae. But since this is "candy for the soul" and too much candy does make you sick, I think I will do it in small doses, in several posts, with a decent amount of time between them.

Because I was looking for something else, I found the message from 2002 when Bob Rosebrugh invited me to be an editor of TAC (Theory and Applications of Categories). TAC was one of the cleverest things that category theorists did very early on (together with managing to keep a mailing list going). We've had one of the first open-source journals in Mathematics,  since 1995. And I was lucky enough to be invited to its Editorial Board in 2002. Maybe it was the allure of "industrial mathematics", I was in Xerox PARC then. Who knows? 

When I joined  TAC's Editorial Board there was only one woman there, Susan Niefield. She had been the only woman there since 1995.  Now there are six of us, better. TAC has published around 770 articles in its entire career, so far. More recently, having been active in NLP where a single conference, EMNLP 2020 has had the following data:

After receiving 3677 submissions, 3359 of these went through review, of which 754 were accepted to EMNLP and 520 were accepted to Findings of EMNLP. This gives an acceptance rate of 22.4% for EMNLP and a further 15.5% for Findings.

I found out the extent to which the numbers can be different. very different indeed. 

Calling a `citation' the minimum unit of measurement of productivity in Academia is very misleading too. Everyone knows this! But as we are always reminded (e.g. Dunne's short summary) people measure what they can, or "You get what you measure".  But more than individual researchers' gaming the system and/or groups of scientists or publishers ganging up in 'citation farms' (which Dunne discusses), there are also the societal prejudices and old structures conspiring against women, black or brown researchers, gender non-conforming researchers, researchers not from the Global North, etc that change the landscape of academic fields. And keeping working at pointing out these things, in the long run, can be extremely tiring. Deadlines always coincide (Murphy's Law), disease and small (and big disasters) always occur, and constructing things (even simple, small ones like a workshop) is always much more work and time spent than you could possibly estimate.

So, to begin with, a list of things I'm proud of, and I might (or not) discuss these in future blog posts, as time permits:

1. Editorial Boards of TAC, Logical Methods in Computer Science, Logica Universalis, Compositionality.

2. Industry Advisory Board of the Masters in NLP program of UC Santa Cruz.

3. Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam.

4. Council of the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, 2020-2023.

5. Ambassador for Logic, Vienna Centre for Logic and Algorithms. 

Special mention to the ``Encontro Brasileiro de Mulheres Matematicas" at IMPA in 2019, where I talked about how Applied Category Theory is the way I want to connect algebra, programming, and logic, but especially why I think we need to pay attention to gender gaps in maths, computer science, and logic.