Women in Logic 2021, yay!!

 

We just had another great edition of Women in Logic! Congrats to the organizers Sandra Alves, Sandra Kiefer and Ana Sokolova for a fun, challenging and  diverse meeting! Thanks also to our Invited Speakers Professors Simona Ronchi Della Rocca (Università di Torino) and Rineke Verbrugge (University of Groningen) for very inspiring talks!

This time we didn't have any incidents like last year (my write-up of the incident last year is in https://logic-forall.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-curious-incident-of-dropped.html, if you want to see it), but on the other hand we didn't have the streaming either and this is not so good. 

We are a small workshop, so we follow what the conference we're associating with says; and I think it's fair to say that the main issue this year has been the registration fee, which was plainly terrible. This came as a surprise to me (and, I believe, to everyone else too!). Since last year there was no registration fee for the workshop, I thought this year was going  be the same. After all,  our workshop is about logic work done by women, but it is not exactly a huge source of brownie points (or commercial value) to anyone. We help people get used to presenting their work, in other more 'hostile' environments, and I have been extremely impressed with the quality of the work the young ones do. They get some amount of mentoring on their papers and on dealing with questions, misunderstandings, etc. But for the audience, which is there to cheer them on and to learn a few things about their work, to pay 30 euros for a single day seems excessively expensive! 

After all, the silver lining of the pandemic and of the lockdowns had been the possibility,  for many, to interact with their academic heroes, to watch seminars that happened in all parts of the world, "to be" in Australia one day and the next in Colombia, while still hearing about your favorite subject. That now people insist on gatekeeping these possibilities, by making the conferences unaffordable, seems perverse.

I understand that even online conferences have costs that need to be paid, but I worry that calculations and sponsorships are following outdated models. And I believe the push to make it more accessible needs to be done by everyone in the community, not just a few. Otherwise, the prestigious conferences will carry on being unaffordable, reproducing the sins of the conventional publication model.

Why are videos so difficult to find and keep?

I wanted to make a list of the videos I've recorded recently. 

I thought this would be what a youtube channel meant: a place where you put your own videos. I simply wanted to copy these videos from some other places. For example the talk I gave in the Logic SuperGroup, the one in the Proof Theory Seminar,  the one at the MIT Category Theory, etc. 

And it's probably just me being stupid, but this seems very hard to do.

Ok, the videos are very big and take a lot of space and of time to process. But surely, there must be an easy way to do something like what I want.

Anyways for the time being, here's just a collection of links to talks I've given.

1. Structural and Distributional Meaning Representations Logicos em Quarentena  SBL

2. Dialectica Categories for the Lambek Calculus Logic Super Group

3. Natural Language Inference for Humans women+@DCS Sheffield

4. Benchmarking Linear Logic Proofs  Augusta Colloquium 

5. Relevant Dialectica Categories MIT Category Seminar

6. GraphKR Semantic Parsing for Portuguese Fundacao Getulio Vargas 

7. Benchmarking Linear Logic Proofs Proof theory Seminar 

8. Dialectica Categories: the mathematical version BACAT Meet-up 

9. Ontologies and Semantics for Portuguese Painel Ontobras 

10. PUC-Rio: Digital Technologies and the Areas of Human Knowledge 

11.  World Logic Day video Ambassador of Logic

12. A semantica nossa de cada dia EBCT 

13. Categorical Models for Explicit Substitutions  UnB

14. Entre a cruz e a caldeirinha  Brasileiras no PLN

15. LL for Constructive Mathematics   Working Logician

16. Dialectica and Kolmogorov Problems Finding the Right Abstractions

17. Constructive Modalities Celebrating Women in Mathematics   

We also organized Logica e Representatividade in 14 January 2021 and I was invited to the Emilia's Podcast, which was a blast. Many thanks to Adolfo Neto e Maria Claudia Emer for the fun chat!

Spring has sprung

 

Spring has sprung and knocked me off badly. Had a horrible dental surgery, four hours plus on the dentist chair with billions of bad things happening. This was on Tuesday. Thought, oh dear, I guess I miscalculated how bad this was going to be, now, I will take my medicines and be back on my feet tomorrow. ho, ho, this was the good day. My body mounted a united front against the medication prescribed (medication that I had had several times before) and I got to feel really weak, as I kept being sick several times a day. 

Not good, not good at all. I'm finally better, touch wood, and  now I have read Terry Pratchett's Nation and I loved it. 

I was reminded of the many reasons why I love Pratchett's books: they do make you think about the important things in life in novel ways. My favorites are the Witches stories, I love all the witches, but Granny Weatherwax is a favorite: "If you want to amount to anything as a witch you got to learn three things. What’s real, what’s not real, and what’s the difference.” 

“We look to… the edges,' said Mistress Weatherwax. 'There’s a lot of edges, more than people know. Between life and death, this world and the next, night and day, right and wrong… an’ they need watchin’. We watch ‘em, we guard the sum of things.  

“You can‘t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it‘s just a cage.” 

Cage or no cage, it's time to go back to thinking about multiagent systems and what do we expect of them minimally. Well, if you have many agents, one expects that each one of them is a reasoning agent on its own and that its reasoning can be of the classical, constructive, linear  or modal variety. And similarly, when considering how they interact with each other, the same possibilities arrive. Thus it would make some sense to compare these kinds of reasoning agents. Something that we want to discuss next.

(when the internet is behaving a bit better and I can upload pictures!)

Dialectica Categories as Matrices

 

The Topos Institute officially opened on the 4th January 2021. On the 4th February David Spivak gave the first  Topos Institute Colloquium on the category POLY. I have not decided, yet, what I want to talk about in the Colloquium: too many ideas.  But when Brendan Fong suggested that we had internal talks where we explain to our colleagues what we do, I was very pleased to do it. The idea was a short talk, with few or no slides and lots of discussion. Great, right?

I talked on Friday and the slides are already in slideshare. And the conversation was great, but we couldn't get to half of the material. Oh well, the discussion was that good. So I decided that writing a few blog posts about the various Dialectica categories and some of the work that ensued is a good thing. This is the first post. 

 

The Dialectica construction starts from a cartesian closed base category (with coproducts -- think of Sets!) and builds structure on top of that. 

So we have a new category Dial whose objects are triples (U, X, alpha), where U and X are sets and alpha is a relation. Now you can think of a relation alpha either as a subset of a product (alpha is contained in the product UxX) or as a map, from the product UxX to 2, taking a pair of elements (u,x) to alpha(u,x) which either holds (alpha(u,x)=1) or doesn't hold (alpha(u,x)=0). Here we will concentrate on the view of relations as maps to 2, instead of subsets. (OK, I do need to find a way of inserting LaTeX here, will do it soon!)

Now recently I became aware of a series of blog posts by Scott Garrabrant that describe how Chu spaces can be given an intuitive explanation in terms of a collection of agents interacting with an environment. Since Chu spaces and dialectica categories have (almost) the same objects, this same explanation works for dialectica categories too. So you can think of U as your (undercover) agents, and of  X as your unknown environments and alpha relates some agents to some unknown conditions in the environment.

One of the differences between Chu spaces and dialectica objects is that for Chu the set in which we evaluate the relation W does not have any structure: it's simply a set with elements {w, v, t,...}.  For dialectica we need an order on the elements of W to even construct the category.

Here's Scott's concrete example: Consider the case where there are two possible environments, $r$ for rain, and $s$ for sun. The agent independently chooses between two options, $u$ for umbrella, and $n$ for no umbrella, r for rain and s for sunny, $U=\{u,n\}$ and $X=\{r,s\}$. There are four possible worlds in $W=\{ur,us,nr,ns\}$. We interpret $ur$ as the world where the agent has an umbrella and it is raining, and similarly for the other worlds. The Chu  C space looks like a matrix 2x2, but nothing stops me from thinking of this as a dialectica object:

$C_{}=\begin{array}{cc}& \begin{array}{cc}r& s\end{array}\\ \begin{array}{c}u\\ n\end{array}& \left(\begin{array}{cc}ur& us\\ nr& ns\end{array}\right)\end{array}$

Vaughan Pratt has been trying to convince me that these matrices are lovely since before 2000, when we organized together a Workshop on Chu and Dialectica Spaces in Santa Barbara, that eventually became the TAC Special Volume. But while Vaughan has tried to tell me that the matrices are a good model of Linear Logic, Scott tells me that are a useful way of formalizing a community of agents.

I have been wanting to have a model of reasoning agents for a while. Dealing with multiagent systems (MAS) is what my friends Natasha and Brian do and I have always wanted to try to work more with them. So this is not it, yet, but I hope this thinking of dialectica categories as multiagent systems might turn out to be the bridge I need to work with Natasha again.

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.