Some weeks are really hard

 Our friend Veronica left us last Tuesday. Veronica was a wonderful friend, a person one could count on, for real. One who did not complain about things in life, and it was always ready for a lunch, a book discussion, a woman's march and/or anything else she thought was important. 

You really had to know her very well to realize she was fighting a cancer for many years. She was a true engineer, very proud of her work on improving performance of systems (at Samsung), but she rarely talked to us about her work. We have a women's lunch, the BWITCH (something like `Brazilian Women in Tech' lunch), which, like so many of these meetings, sometimes increased, sometimes waned a bit, depending on how busy people were. Lately, we were in a not-so-active phase, after many zoom meetings over the pandemic. And I thought everything was getting better for Veronica's health, I really don't know where I find this misplaced optimism of mine. 

On Sunday there was a memorial for her, and many people discovered many facets of Veronica's personality that we knew nothing about, like I learned that she did martial arts! The hiker, the pottery artist, the devoted wife and mother, the woman committed to improving society I knew well, but there were many other sides that I knew nothing about. I used to tease her quite a bit about being an engineer thru and thru and in the last weeks I had been planning to talk to her about persimmons. We have a persimmon tree and we don't like the fruit, which Veronica likes, so I always write to her to come and collect some, which she organizes carefully to make sure they finish ripening at the right time, in the right way. This year the fruit is ready to be picked up much earlier than usual, and I had been meaning to write her for a while saying it, when the horrible news arrived that she was in a coma. Some days later she was gone.  I did not manage to say goodbye. So I'm saying it here: Rest in power, Veronica!

Ada Lovelace Day 2022: Bertha Lutz

 This is a year of politics in Brazil. The election for President of the Republic is going on at the moment, we had the first turn, the second turn of voting is within a week. It occurred to me that I don't know much about the feminist movement in Brazil. I don't know enough about History, and I wish I did. So this blog post is about when voting for women started in Brazil.

The state of Rio Grande do Norte was a pioneer in providing in 1926, in its Electoral Law,  that "all citizens who meet the conditions required by law may vote and be voted on, without distinction of sex." The following year,  Celina Guimarães Viana became the first female voter in the country and, in April 1928, the first woman to vote.

In 1929, Alzira Soriano won 60% of the votes and on January 1 of the following year she was sworn in as mayor of Lajes, in Rio Grande do Norte. She was the first woman in Latin America to assume the government of a city.  It was only in 1932, during the government of Getúlio Vargas, that women gained the right to vote and were able to run for political office. In 1933, Carlota Pereira de Queirós became the first Brazilian federal deputy from São Paulo.

But the post is about Bertha Lutz because she was a scientist, a biologist.

Bertha Maria Júlia Lutz (August 2, 1894 – September 16, 1976) was a Brazilian feminist activist, biologist, educator, diplomat and politician.  She was the daughter of Adolfo Lutz, scientist and pioneer of tropical medicine. She was also one of the most significant figures of feminism and education in Brazil in the early 20th century. 

She specialized in amphibians and, in 1919, became secretary and researcher at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, being the second woman to be part of the public service in the country. She was later promoted to head of the Museum's Botany department, a position she held until her retirement in 1964. In August 1965, she received the title of professor emeritus at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

 In 1922, she organized the First Feminist Congress of Brazil and represented Brazilian women at the General Assembly of the League of Women Voters, held in the United States, where she was elected vice president of the Pan-American Society of Women. After returning to Brazil, she helped found the Brazilian Federation for Feminine Progress (FBPF), of which she was president until 1942 and whose main banner was the demand for women's suffrage.

 In 1929, Bertha and other members of the FBPF created the União Universitária Feminina (Feminine University Union), which in 1961 was renamed the Brazilian Association of University Women. One of the primary goals of the organization was to encourage higher education by the female population. In 1937, the Union was formally invited to participate in the creation of the National Union of Students (UNE). The Brazilian suffragette movement had a great victory on February 24, 1932, the date on which President Getúlio Vargas, through Decree No. 21 076, installed the new Electoral Code and guaranteed the right of women to vote in the country. 

So yes, this jumble of dates and names above is just to say that women can vote and be voted in Brazil since 1932! But in Brazil the law tends to be good, but not sufficiently enforced. As the popular saying goes "leis são como vacinas, umas pegam, outras não". But the real history is always more complicated than what we hear: here (link) is an example.

And, it is true, in 2011, Brazil elected its first woman President, Dilma Roussef. But politics is still dominated by men, in absurd numbers. One of the new developments in which I am putting lots of hope in is the 'Bancada do Cocar' (the headress caucus. More about that, especially the numbers in Brazilian politics, later on.

MRC@Cupertino accomplished

 This week we had MRC@Cupertino. This was great! Since I had issues with tachycardia and could not go to Beaver Hollow at the end of May, some of the participants of our Mathematical Research Community (MRC) came over to work with me. We were a bit unlucky with the weather, it was far too hot to stay outside and work in the Memorial Park, as I thought we would. But the air conditioning at the Quinlan Center where we had our official meetings worked well and we've managed several sessions of recap and discussion.

 The four groups we had organized for the MRC (Dialectica and Poly, Dialectica and Lenses, Dialectica and Games, Petri Processes and implementations) had representatives and we have made some progress in these four themes. Everyone is planning to submit abstracts for the JMM in January 2023, the deadline is in two days.  

As usual, I had hoped to be much further along on our discussions and wanted to be able to write something about the `Dialectica Extended Family' to complement the old papers Dialectica and Chu constructions: cousins? and Hofstra's The dialectica monad and its cousins as well  as the blogposts Dialectica categories and polynomial functors (Part 1) (Nelson Niu) and Lenses for Philosophers (Jules Hedges) and Sean Moss' talk in the Polynomial Workshop 2022 Dependent products of polynomials. But I am very slow, even more so after the cardiac issues earlier this year. 

Also collaborative research has perks (you can get much more done), but also drawbacks: you must learn from the differences. So it doesn't go as you want it, it goes as all of you want it, to go. Collaborators have ideas and agendas of their own, which is wonderful. And it is also true that research in general doesn't go the way you expect it: if it always did, it wouldn't be research, but simply development. I am very aware that I need to let go of some of my old fashioned wishes for the Dialectica categories.

Healthy or Sick?

 

 I wanted to recap the papers I have written recently. Because I need to decide how to work while in recovery mode--things are much slower now. 

 So I copied the following lists from the Topos Institute output page. Papers first:

1. Davide Trotta, Matteo Spadetto, Valeria de Paiva Dialectica Principles via Gödel Doctrines Submitted to Theoretical Computer Science 2022 arXiv:2205.07093
2. Davide Trotta, Matteo Spadetto, Valeria de Paiva Dialectica Logical Principles: not only rules Submitted to Journal of Logic and Computation. 2022.
   
3. Valeria de Paiva, Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Livy Real Of Seringueiros and Sambistas: Occupation Mappings in Historical Text 2nd DHandNLP 2022 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3128
4. John Baez, Simon Cho, Daniel Cicala, Nina Otter, Valeria de Paiva Applied category theory in chemistry, computing, and social networks Notices of the American Mathematical Society 2022AMS (MRC initial paper) DOI:10.1090/noti2422 https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/mrc_2022.pdf
   
5. Davide Trotta, Matteo Spadetto, Valeria de Paiva Dialectica Logical Principles International Symposium on Logical Foundations of Computer Science 2022 arXiv:2109.08064 DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-93100-1_22 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-93100-1_22
6. Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Hai Hu, Alexander Frank Webb, Lawrence S. Moss, Valeria de Paiva Curing the SICK and other NLI maladies Under Review 2021 Submitted for publication
7. Luiz Carlos Pereira, Elaine Pimentel, Valeria de Paiva Duas Negações Ecumênicas De Mathematicae atque Philosophicae Elegantia: Notas Festivas para Abel Lassalle Casanave 2021 ISBN:978-1-84890-382-1
8. Valeria de Paiva Dialectica Comonads 9th Conference on Algebra and Coalgebra in Computer Science (CALCO 2021) 2021 DOI:10.4230/LIPIcs.CALCO.2021.3
   
9. Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Livy Real, Annebeth Buis, Martha Palmer, Valeria de Paiva. Annotation Difficulties in Natural Language Inference Simpósio Brasileiro de Tecnologia da Informação e da Linguagem Humana (STIL) 2021 DOI:10.5753/stil.2021.17804
10. Valeria de Paiva, Sergei Artemov. Intuitionistic Modal Logic and Applications Journal of Applied Logics 2021 Editors, ISBN:978-1-84890-377-7 http://collegepublications.co.uk/ifcolog/?00050
    
11. Ugo Dal Lago, Valeria de Paiva. Proceedings of 2020 Joint Workshop Linearity & Trends on Linear Logic and Applications Summer of LoVE (Logic and Verification), Paris, France, online 2021 arXiv:2112.14305 DOI:10.4204/EPTCS.353 https://lipn.univ-paris13.fr/LinearityTLLA2020/
12. Davide Trotta, Matteo Spadetto, Valeria de Paiva. The Gödel Fibration 46th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 2021 arXiv:2104.14021 DOI:10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2021.87
    
13. Valeria de Paiva, Livy Real Towards FraCaS-BR OpenCor  2021 https://opencor.gitlab.io/corpora/paiva21towards/
14. Elena Di Lavore, Wilmer Leal, Valeria de Paiva Dialectica Petri Nets Submitted for publication 2021 arXiv:2105.12801
    
15. Valeria de Paiva, Samuel G. da Silva. Kolmogorov-Veloso Problems and Dialectica Categories Chapter in book “A Question is More Illuminating than an Answer. A Festschrift for Paulo A. S. Veloso” 2021 arXiv:2107.07854
16. Paul Tarau, Valeria de Paiva Deriving Theorems in Implicational Linear Logic, Declaratively EPTCS 2020 arXiv:2009.10241 DOI:10.4204/EPTCS.325.18

Talks:

1. Dialectica Categories Revisited 8th CSLI Workshop on Logic, Rationality & Intelligent Interaction, Stanford University 2022/05/22 https://csliworkshop.sites.stanford.edu/
2. PLN pra Tod@s IC-CDI C4AI, USP, Sao Paulo, Brazil 2022/04/27
3. Doing Without a Modality MSFP/ETAPS 2022/04/02 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uTsihTketw
4. Problemas de Kolmogorov-Veloso UFBa 2022/03/21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CHG5cdA0q4
5. Dialectica Petri Nets Intercats 2022/03/08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xysbkS3Jx24
6. Natural Language Inference: for Humans and Machines Topos Institute Berkeley Seminar 2022/01/24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCf99I7VMR0
   
7. Negation in the ecumenical system 1st Brazil-Colombia Logic meeting 2021/12/17 https://sites.google.com/unal.edu.co/i-enclogbracol/program
8. The importance of being Earnest: open datasets in Portuguese OpenCor Workshop (Bracis) 2021/12/03 https://underline.io/events/244/sessions?eventSessionId=9276
9. Constructive Modal and Linear Logics Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia 2021/12/02http://cs.ioc.ee/lsg/tsem/tsem21/depaiva0212-video.mp4
   
10. Semantics and Reasoning: for NLP, AI and ACT Ada Lovelace Day, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge 2021/10/20
11. Dialectica Comonads CALCO Invited Talk 2021/08/31 https://www.coalg.org/calco-mfps2021/programme/
    
12. Categorical Explicit Substitutions Topos Institute Colloquium 2021/08/19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_gu1r7LNyc
13. Constructive Modalities Seventh Ticamore Meeting 2021/06/16 https://ticamore.logic.at/virtual2021/
14. Categorical Semantics for Explicit Substitutions University of Cambridge Category Theory Seminar 2021/06/01
    
15. Constructive Modalities Dinâmicas: Celebrating Women in Math 2021/05/25 http://www.dinamicas.im.ufrj.br/celebra-cwinm/
16. Dialectica and Kolmogorov Problems Finding the Right Abstractions 2021/05/19https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxhOSVoyar8
    
17. Linear Logic and Constructive Mathematics Philosophy PUC-Rio: Working Logician 2021 2021/04/21
18. Categorical Models for Explicit Substitutions GTC-UnB 2021/02/08 https://youtu.be/w4tTdai9mTg
    
19. A semântica nossa de cada dia 1st Brazilian Meeting on Category Theory 2021/01/27 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjtwajF6ovs
    

 I'm sure there are some things missing, but this is a start. Now for the hard part: to decide on what to work, when.

Late for MRC

 I have not written here for more than a month as I was preparing frantically for our Applied Category Theory-MRC in Beaver Hollow on the Dialectica construction in programming. Then I got ill and had to be taken to the emergency room in the Stanford Hospital.  Twice. 

The first time I went simply to see my general doctor because I was feeling a bit weak, but the doctors didn't like  my pulse rate at all and send me to the ER immediately. I thought it was a big joke, as I was feeling fine, I didn't even realize that my heart was racing. They did something that I thought was a small miracle of science: a cardioversion. This is when they inject a drug that stops your heart for a second and that reboots it. So I thought they had solved the problem and then I wanted to go home and forget all about it.

However, four days later, the same thing happened again. This time I was  fully aware of the heart racing and I panicked quite a bit. I ended up having another cardioversion, but I wasn't marvelling at their technology anymore. I was just worrying that this might be it. That I was going to die of an overzealous heart. 

I stayed in the hospital one night, under the counselling of a young ER doctor who said, `if you were my mom, I wouldn't let you out of here'. That was pretty convincing. In the hospital I started medication and, the next day, met my cardiologist.  I am now trying to take small steps in the direction of accepting that instead of being super healthy and able to do anything I want, I am now very fragile, as this whole thing might start again, from nowhere.

This whole drama meant that I was not able to participate of our MRC fully. I tried at the distance, but it doesn't work very well. More than the two years (pandemic issues) in the making and the last  month of intense preparation have at least meant that the group was able to do quite a bit. I'm extremely proud of the Team Dialectica, pictured below.

Our group was divided into 4 subgroups: Dialectica and Games (Jeremie), Dialectica and Poly (Nelson), Dialectica and Lenses (Bruno and Matteo), and Dialectica Petri Net implementations (Eric). The names in parentheses are the leads of the subgroups. The issues are overlapping, of course. And the competencies and backgrounds of the participants are very different. But I'm told the group had a good time, despite the fact that one of our own got covid there or getting there. He's fine now though!

The presencial phase of the MRC is done, but now comes the second phase, working out the ideas discussed during the brainstorm in Beaver Hollow. I am not very sure how this phase is supposed to go, but I do hope we'll be able to get papers from all the  subgroups!

Natural Language and Computer Science (NLCS): what's that?

 Larry Moss (pictured above in the official department photo) and I have worked on our small workshop NLCS (Natural Language and Computer Science) for several years now. The main goal of the workshop was to introduce our friends in theoretical computer science to the extremely nice problems that NL semantics and computational linguistics throws at us, as logicians. And conversely.

The first edition of the workshop happened in New Orleans in 2013 and it was a lot of fun. As we said, when introducing the workshop, associated to LiCS 2013:

Formal tools coming from logic and category theory are important in both natural language semantics and in computational semantics. Moreover, work on these tools borrows heavily from all areas of theoretical computer science. In the other direction, applications having to do with natural language have inspired developments on the formal side. 

We were then and still are interested in work covering both directions: work in NL that is an application of work in CS and work in CS that uses the tools of NL. For that first edition of NLCS we had as Invited Speakers Robin Cooper, Ian Pratt-Hartmann, and Wlodek Zadrozny, then recently arrived at UNC, Charlotte, from IBM. Our program committee was very small, us, Annie Zaenen and Bill MacCartney. 

 Maybe the acronym wasn't a very clever idea, as baseball will always be much more popular and the National League Championship Series makes us all but unfindable in the internet.

After that we had NLCS'14, NLCS'15, NLCS'16, NLCS'18 and NLCS'19. So six workshops so far. Lots of interesting work presented. The next step is to find all the programs!

 

Kolmogorov the Genius

 

It feels a bit odd when your mathematical heroes are so far away from your usual heroes. 

Take Gentzen, for instance: maybe he was misguided, and incompetent as far as political views go and not genuinely evil. But the fact is that he was a card-carrying Nazi too and that doesn't feel good. Maybe this is compensated by Dummett being a card-carrying good guy in the fight against racism through his whole life, I don't know. But I worry that someone is going to come up with a story of hypocrisy or something. Hope not!

Meanwhile, I wonder if I am the only one noticing that Kolmogorov/Alexandrov is the biggest gay love story ever? they always met in the same holiday house for more than 40 years. and they were not coy to mention which other in all sorts of official documents. they were both married, but still, how did they manage? The Wikipedia article does point it out.

A controversial life altogether: a nobleman, with an unmarried mother who died of chilbirth, a father who disappeared in the Civil War, the Suslin affair, the Soviet honours, the dedication to teaching. and the creation of whole gigantic areas of mathematics, the engine of the transformations in our society. 

But yes, the blog post is to remind me to read properly Kolmogorov's 1925 article

• 1925. "On the principle of the excluded middle" in Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press: 414–37.

and to keep a link to the London Mathematical Society Kolmogorov Obituary, (https://londmathsoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1112/blms/22.1.31).

Maybe this seems crazy, but I also wanted to add here a comment about Dan Hernest recently published paper "Modal Functional Dialectica Interpretation" with Triffonov. Because they start with 

Functional interpretations, derived from Goedels's computability adaptation of Aristotle's insights...

and I wanted to know what were these  Aristotle's insights that were referred to, so I wrote to Dan. But to him it was folklore, in Romanian, via the philosopher Mircea Florian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_Florian, who translated Aristotle from old Greek. So no clear reference here.

I wanted to thank Samuel Gomes da Silva for all the work together in the last ten years! It has certainly kept me going!  

Thanks also to the Logicas Brasileiras for the Carol Blasio Day! It was a blast, as it's usually the case with our antics. But more about it in the next post.