Better reporting in 2021

 I am truly appalling at reporting the work I have done. So my new year's resolution is to improve (at least a little) on that. 

 

I have been working since 2015 in the Scholarship Committee of the ACM-W, when I was invited to join by Adriana Compagnoni. I have mixed feelings about the organization (I have mixed feelings about all the professional organization societies nowadays!) but I do believe that giving young students some money to attend computing conferences is a good thing.

Now work in the Scholarship Committee, like all other voluntary work, is heavier than it looks. So you join thinking, it's only some 2 hours times 6 a year, I can do that. But then the hours multiply themselves and things get to be much more work than you thought it would be and mostly it needs to happen (Murphy's Law) when you actually have a very hard time to do it! But this is life.

So I first worked for the Scholarship Committee as a judge of awards. But I hated the job, as the criteria are not so clear, there's an awful lot of scope for people gaming the system and I hated not doing a proper job. So I've asked to be only a writer for the committee and now I only describe what what people have judged. But  then the corona virus hit. And things got complicated. I think we need to take the opportunity to make things better, if we can. But who knows whether we can or not?

Meanwhile, this was my December 2020 note for the Scholarship, apart from the boilerplate that we have in every newsletter, of course.

   This month, almost nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, with many conferences postponed, cancelled or transformed into online events, fewer people are submitting applications. Thus, we decided that this was a convenient time to write about our Scholarship Committee, some about our origins, and motivations, some about the people that keep it running. 

We first had short interviews with the Chairs of the Scholarship Committee, professors Elaine Weyuker and Viviana Bono, in previous editions of the newsletter. But it also seemed appropriate to ask the members of our committee about their personal histories. Of course, as you may have noticed yourself,  working from home has not made life easier for researchers and professors. Everyone who teaches  has had to adapt to the new conditions. For many, this has proved a very difficult journey to digital teaching, without any time for learning or preparation. Still, everyone in academia is l trying to cope with the new reality of the pandemic as best as they can, and we are not an exception.

This seems a good time to tell you a bit about why we run the Scholarship Committee the way we do and also a bit about the stories of the people behind the scenes. And we’re glad to start off with a  researcher who was an alumna of the program herself, only a few years back. Yelena Mejova is a Senior Research Scientist at the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, a part of the Digital Epidemiology Group. Her research concerns the use of social media in health informatics, as well as tracking political speech and other cultural phenomena. (To read the interview with Prof Mejova head to https://women.acm.org/updates-on-acm-w-scholarship-for-attendance-of-research-conferences)

The A

Too many ideas, too little time

Last week we had our "Logica e Representatividade" (Logic and Representativeness) meeting on the 14th January 2021, the World Logic Day, almost a week ago  today. The meeting went very well! I was a bit concerned that we had only decided to do it around the 14th December and there was the festive period (between Christmas and New Year's)  in the middle of this month! of course sensible people don't do much during these holidays, so I worried that we would end up without speakers, without discussions and without an audience. and true to the old adage that when in doubt, just produce some slidedeck or two, I spent some lovely panic time doing exactly that.

 

Thank goodness I was wrong in all three accounts: all of our Invited Speakers did show up with some lovely videos, moving histories, clever positioning. The discussions flowed naturally and we had a decent audience on YouTube, I'm told. As I had said in December, the idea was to get the ball rolling, to start the discussions on all kinds of lack of representation in Logic, and we certainly did that. the difficulty will be the next step!

 

But meanwhile I have been thinking about Public Announcement logic (PAL). More precisely about intuitionistic  PAL, as described by Ma, Palmigiano and Sadrzadeh in "Algebraic semantics and model completeness for IntuitionisticPublic Announcement Logic" and by Balbiani and Galmiche's "About intuitionistic public announcement logic". 

 

The reason I've been thinking about it is that I wanted to complete some old work with Natasha Alechina, Michael Mendler and Eike Ritter in "Categorical and Kripke semantics for constructive S4 modal logic".

The issue I want to explore is the relationship between algebraic semantics and frame semantics. 

A quote for World Logic Day

My friends at the  Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms at Vienna University of Technology (VCLA at TU Wien) invited me to be an Ambassador for Logic, in their celebrations of World Logic Day 2021.

At first, I was somewhat reticent, I am no good at slogans and epigrams (I wish I was!).

But then I got into the spirit, I think, and you can see my quote below:

When all is said and done, what's left, what stays, from being human, is Logic. Logic removes all the flesh and ornaments, and gives us the underlying bones of what we know. Whether it intends to do so or not, logic turns out to be a moral compass. We overlook it at our own peril, as Logic is even more inexorable than taxes and death.

 At least I think I can say with a clean conscience that I am a logician, not so sure about semanticist, computer scientist, AI researcher, mathematician, or philosopher. But I try.

But then the DIVISION OF LOGIC, METHODOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY asked some of its logicians for a short video about the importance of Logic. So I recorded a 2 min message  and this message end up in the Conseil International de Philosophie et des Sciences Humaines (CIPSH), cool! 

(yeah, I think I could get used to this idea of people asking me about my opinion! it does have a nice ring to it, I say, I say)

Just so that I remember

I need to go over all the posts on the Women in Logic Facebook group and 'store' them somewhere safe, either adding them to blogs or at least keeping the information for future use. 

but of course, this takes an awful lot of effort and time, which I haven't got right now. 

So simply a quick cut-and-paste of one such:

OH WELL, I THOUGHT WE HAD IT BAD WITH YOUTUBE TAKING DOWN THE STREAMING OF WOMEN IN LOGIC, OUR WORKSHOP, ON 30 JUNE 2020. I HAD NO IDEA HOW BAD OTHERS HAD IT. 

some links H/T Bruno Lops 

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/zoom-coronavirus-racist-zoombombing

https://www.uol.com.br/universa/noticias/redacao/2020/08/30/em-reunioes-virtuais-mulheres-sao-atacadas-com-porno-e-mensagens-machistas.htm

https://www.metroweekly.com/2020/11/durham-university-zoom-call-hijacked-in-anti-lgbtq-attack

https://computerworld.com.br/seguranca/conferencia-no-zoom-e-invadida-com-imagens-de-apologia-ao-nazismo-e-atentado-ao-pudor

https://www.blogdedaltroemerenciano.com.br/.../hackers.../

Frege and his little monsters

This is NOT a serious post, in case this is not obvious. 

I don't like quantifiers, I call them Frege's little monsters.

I don't like the universal quantifier  because it brings infinity into models. Don't get me wrong, I love infinity as much as any other mathematician and I still get a twinge of pride when I explain Cantor's basic theorems (enumerability of the rationals and lack of such of the reals)  to anyone who hasn't seen them before, especially young ones. But I once attended a lecture by Phokion Kolaitis, who showed me that finite model theory is really very 'different' from model theory: nothing works the way models are supposed to work. It is not the case (as I thought before) that finite model theory is an easy (because finite and surveyable) instance of usual model theory. And one can do an awful lot without bringing infinite domains into our logic pictures.

Also universal quantification and especially vacuous quantification is horrible and very non-intuitive. The typical example of something that we feel forced to accept simply because, without it, the system is even worse.

But you have a duality, people might object. Maybe simply look at the existential quantifier and let the universal be simply its dual. Well,  this does not work for constructivists, who do not believe that 'for all' and 'there exists' are totally dual. But  also, if you chose the existential that is  not exactly dual to universal quantification, the one that has more content, the one which says which 'x' is that that makes "there exists x such that A(x)" true, well then you have a connective that has complicated binding rules, requires commuting conversions and it's not  proof-theoretically well-behaved.

Semantically it's very simple, right? If you say that there exists something such that the predicate A is true of that something, well, just show me the culprit! Call it 'a', because we have a long tradition of thinking of x's and y's as variables and thinking of a's and b's as constants and  then we know that "A(a)" is true. And that a model of this sentence should have 'a' in its domain. Seems simple and direct, but it is anything but simple.

So they are both little monsters, Frege's monstrinhos, and when we want to model them categorically not only do we need our triple adjunction, we also need the Beck-Chevelley condition (BCC), which everyone does its best not to explain. Of course the whole set-up of free and bound variables, predicates and functions, and how substitution works for them, has to be put in place and made to work, before you can add the little monsters.

Anyways I was about to post here a picture of  Frege by Renee Jorgensen Bolinger, in the style of van Gogh. Her pictures of philosophers are great and I really want to buy a few, you can see them at her site.

But she requires people to ask her for permission and I cannot be bothered, so you just need to go and look up her site!