Special Session on Proof Theory @ Irvine 2020 CANCELLED!

Really sad to report that the ASL Annual Meeting at Irvine https://sites.uci.edu/asl2020/ has just been cancelled, due to the public health concerns over COVID-19. we (Elaine Pimentel, Reuben Rowe and I) had a lovely Special Session in Proof Theory organized for it!

General Information The 2020 North American Annual Meeting of the ASL will be held March 25-28 at the University of California, Irvine. Laguna Beach: less than 20 minutes away. Program Committee Liron Cohen (Cornell) James Cummings (Carnegie Mellon) Denis Hirschfeldt (Chicago | Chair) Phokion Kolait...

Elaine Pimentel and Reuben Rowe organized a special session on Proof Theory as part of the 2020 North American Annual Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, at the  University of California, Irvine Irvine, California March 25–28, 2020. They invited me to join them, as they might not be able to come to California. So I'm doing it!

The full program is in this link. Quite a lot happening in the special session, see below!

Amazing how things that look very simple can end up being more complicated than you think.
Life has a habit of changing things when you least expect it.

And yes, I do not think that we're going to see any of the San Joaquin marsh (picture above), but who knows? It showed up when I looked for pictures of Irvine!

Too much reviewing is bad for you!

I clearly have been accepting too many requests for participating in Program Committees. I am reviewing for the top conferences in Computational Linguistics (ACL and COLING), AI (AAAI and IJCAI), and theoretical computer science (LiCS and ICALP). And there are also the smaller, more specialized meetings, which also require a serious amount of work to do a half-decent job. As a consequence, instead of doing my own work, I am really tired of trying to understand other peoples' work, at a breakneck speed.

Of course, the temptation to accept these invitations is huge. These are my three main fields of activity and a few years back I'd kill for "one" such invitation. So this embarrassment of riches is disturbing, to say the least.  (and I am not even starting on the big  issue  above of working for free to make rich bastards richer.) But sometimes I am reminded of why being a reviewer is not only hard work. You do actually get to know plenty of other work that is really interesting and that you want to know more about.

So I only recently got to know about Conal Elliot's work on "The simple essence of automatic differentiation". You can read/watch about it from Conal himself here. It seems that there's an awful lot more about it around though. That, I don't know about it, yet. But I also got to know about Conal's suggestion of writing papers, by writing blog posts. This seems a nice idea, if a little dangerous. If you're trying to do a Polymath project, everyone knows that sometimes things do not work. (This is research, not development, after all!) But in a research-by-blogging situation, what happens if nothing works? oh well, I guess the only way to know is trying it.

Meanwhile from Elsevier, a nice picture only on their blog.

Becoming a Philosopher

Benedikt Löwe was kind enough to forward me an invitation to be Assessor in the  DLMPST Council 2020-2023. This is the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology (DLMPST),  of the  International Union of History and Philosophy of Science.

The Division is extremely important for logicians the world over, have a look at its past Presidents and Assessors in Wikipedia.

I was super stoked with the invitation, of course! 

So I'm now in the Council for four years and intend to learn an awful lot more about the Division, the work of the other assessors and about my own views on Philosophy of Science and Technology. This will be a lot of fun, I'm sure! Many thanks, Benedikt!

November in Amsterdam

I was super glad when Sonja Smets invited me to be part of the  Scientific Advisory Board  of the   Institute for Logic, Language and Computation  (ILLC) in 2017. Last November I visited the ILLC with some other members of the Scientific Advisory Board for the first time, in this new capacity. Moshe Vardi, Mark Steedman, and Hannes Leitgeb were there too.

It was very interesting: ILLC's research is multi-faceted and very impactful. They have many students from all parts of the world. They have a (to me very different) system where faculty have fractional appointments in many different places. Also, like most of the logicians and linguists I know, they are trying to survive what Chris Manning described in his 2015 presidential address to the Association of Computational Linguistics as the "machine learning tsunami".

I talked about the work with Katerina Kalouli and Dick Crouch,  on building hybrid systems for natural language. The paper is  GKR: Bridging the Gap between Symbolic/structural and Distributional Meaning Representations. I need to find the slides.

All things Rust

Well, this was the best news a while ago (in 2016), thanks Alan Jeffrey!

The slide above was taken from Alan's invited talk at LOLA 2016, Rust for Semanticists (slides in https://asaj.org/talks/lola16/).

But I don't think I have made a big song and dance about it in this blog. If I did, I cannot find it now. And I wanted to show it to a young friend, who was asking about PhDs in theoretical computer science. yeah, I had misunderstood his question: he isn't interested in Programming Languages research (shame!) but in Algorithms. oh well, can't win them all.

Now it's sad to notice that most of the work that I did just after my PhD was never published in official venues, i.e proper journals. This was because I was too busy thinking of new stuff, getting married, having kids, trying to find jobs. Some of it was lack of strategic thinking too. So it's particularly nice when someone else recognizes it and calls it out. Now I wonder what else people have been doing with the semantics of Rust, need to check up.

Pleasant Surprise in December

I was looking for ways of doing NER (Named Entity Recognition) in Portuguese and discovered that the spaCy guys have developed an open-source NER system for Portuguese  using our work on Universal Dependencies for Portuguese (paper in https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W17-6523/)

This was a great surprise! I love it!!!

I worry as I don't think the corpus Bosque is good enough. It is small and somewhat old and full of mistakes, but still, the numbers for NER are very good:

NER ACCURACY
NER F	89.18
NER Precision	89.32
NER Recall	89.03

Ada Lovelace Day 2019

Better late than never, as they say. Ulrich reminded me, via Twitter, but this was a busy week. So Ada Lovelace Day is only being celebrated today. The idea, and I celebrated every year since 2011, is to have a blog post to celebrate a  woman badass hero.

Christine Ladd-Franklin, Karen Sparck-Jones, Marta Bunge, Helena Rasiowa,  Nyedja Nascimento, Manuela Sobral, Maryam Mirzakhani, Christine Paulin-Mohring, so far.

Today I decided to celebrate a cosmologist and astrophysicist,  Angela Olinto. Actually I hardly know what to call Angela these days, as she's the Dean of Physical Sciences of the University of Chicago and so many other things. As the U Chicago magazine describes "This past July, Angela V. Olinto, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College, began her appointment as dean of the Physical Sciences Division.

I should explain that "Olinto is best known for her contributions to the study of quark stars, primordial inflation, cosmic magnetic fields, and the origin of the high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos arriving on Earth from distant galaxies." 

Angela was always my extremely clever friend who was also extremely beautiful and nice. Definitely badass hero! But it also gives me the chance to post the following photo from a long time ago, when we had just won the election for the students union.