Women in Logic website

 If there is anything the internet has shown me, it is that repetition is useful. More duplication of posts from the Topos Institute blog.

Women in Logic website launched

by Valeria de PaivaThursday, 17 Mar 2022

Categories: [announcement]
Tags: [logic]

World Logic Day is an international day proclaimed by UNESCO in association with the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (CIPSH) in 2019. The idea is to celebrate it on the 14th of January every year.

Last year we celebrated Logic Day. Not this Logic:

 

Logic.

but more like the Logic of the ideas described below

Also logic.

This year we decided to celebrate Logic Day by launching the 

 Women in Logic website:

www.womeninlogic.org

Women in Logic (WiL) is a collective of women working in logic, as well as a forum that brings together women conducting research in logic and closely related areas, with the goals of enhancing the experience of women in these communities, making their achievements known, and increasing the number of women in logic.

The new Women in Logic website!

The flagship activity of the collective is the Women in Logic workshop that has happened every year since 2017. This workshop is usually associated with one of the big conferences in logic for Computer Science, so either FLoC (Federated Logic conference), LiCS (Logic in Computer Science) or FSCD (Conference on Formal Structures for Computation and Deduction), so far. The workshop has happened in Reykjavík (Iceland), Oxford (UK), Vancouver (Canada), Paris (online due to covid) and Rome (online due to covid). The next workshop should be happening happened in Haifa, Israel, as part of FLoC, on July 31st, 2022.

Women are chronically underrepresented in the Logic communities in Computer Science, in Philosophy, in Cognitive Science and in Mathematics; consequently they sometimes feel both conspicuous and isolated, and hence there is a risk that the under-representation is self-perpetuating. The WiL workshops provide an opportunity for women to increase awareness of one another and one another’s work, to combat the feelings of isolation. It provides an environment where women can present to an audience comprising mostly women, replicating the experience that most men have at most CS meetings, and lowering the stress of the occasion; we hope that this will be particularly attractive to early-career women.

The workshop Women in Logic (WiL) is supported by small grants provided by ACM’s SIGLOG, the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms, the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam and the Topos Institute. Thank you friends!!

• Facebook: WomenInLogic
• Twitter: womeninlogic1
• Blog: womeninlogic.blogspot.com

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Duplicating blog posts?

 

Content gets old and sometimes not accessible any more. Hence, I've decided to duplicate here my blogposts in the Topos blog. At Topos, I have to follow a style that sometimes clashes with mine, while here I can do things my own way. And this is a huge plus. 

Below you can see what was the blog post we wrote about our MathFoldr project 17 months ago. Much can happen in 17 months, but also much can not happen. Despite a very enthusiastic response from our ACT community, we were not able to convince the funding agencies that this is an important project. Thus, the work was carried on, but at a slow pace. I thought I'd update a little the original post with comments, after reproducing the original.

Introducing the MathFoldr Project

by Brendan Fong , Valeria de PaivaSunday, 11 Jul 2021

Categories: [research]
Tags: [MathFoldr] , [AI] , [NLP]

How do we encode, connect, and share knowledge in the 21st Century?

At Topos we believe knowledge empowers people, and that our community’s expertise should be available to all who seek it out. This is why, for example, we broadcast most of our seminars live on YouTube, and actively support numerous open publishing projects, such as the journal Compositionality, the nLab community wiki, or simply making our books freely available online.

But simple availability is not enough. True access is more than an open door: it’s clear, legible street signs, elevators, and gently sloping on-ramps. And with modern AI and natural language processing tools, we believe it’s beyond time to build these accessibility tools for science and mathematics.

This blog post provides an overview of our nascent MathFoldr project, sharing our dreams and our approach so far—and, at the end, a way for you to help just by doing a concrete, 5 minute activity!

1How do we organise mathematics?

A cornerstone of accessibility is search, and math is not easy to search. A striking, recent example comes from Quanta Magazine, November 2019. A group of physicists discovered a useful identity relating eigenvectors and eigenvalues, and did not know if it was novel. To check, they emailed a number of mathematicians, including Fields Medallist Terence Tao. Despite believing the result was “so short and simple—it should have been in textbooks already”, Tao had not previously heard of it. This led to a paper submitted for publication and, soon after, the article in Quanta. In the weeks after the story emerged, more than three dozen previously published instances of the result were reported, dating back to 1934. How can it be that even eminent mathematicians cannot find a widely published, basic result within their field of expertise?

The simple answer is that the mathematical literature has grown far too vast for even an expert to keep track of it all. A recent analysis finds over 120,000 math papers published in 2017 alone, with this rate growing exponentially at 3% a year.

E. Dunne, “Looking at the mathematics literature”, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 66, no. 2, pp. 227–230, 2019. ams.org/journals/notices/201902/rnoti-p227.pdf.

Our infrastructure for organizing and communicating these results has not kept up. The ramifications are significant: wasted search time, duplication of research, and missed connections between fields.

2The MathFoldr vision and path so far

We seek to address this with our MathFoldr project, part of our Networked Mathematics theme. MathFoldr will provide search and literature curation tools that will make mathematics more accessible, with the ultimate goal of transforming the way mathematics is created and navigated.

Today mathematics is rather artisanal: mathematicians craft pdfs of new knowledge, and share these via posting on websites and advertising them in talks. Many recent technologies, from Google, to GitHub, to materials discovered via NLP over materials science literature, show the potential for something much more efficient and effective.

Our strategy for improving this begins with improving the organization and dissemination of math via NLP-powered tools, such as search engines, knowledge graphs, and glossaries, as an entry way to shift publication practices towards ever more formal representations. So the first task is to build ontologies, and to get the community excited and involved with good UI/visualizations.

Right now, we’re doing pilot studies with two corpora, both available on our GitHub:

• a comprehensive but messy one of nLab (community wiki) articles: [ToposInstitute/nlab-corpus]
• a smaller, clean one of TAC (journal) abstracts: [ToposInstitute/tac-corpus]

These pilot studies aim to create a synthesis of machine- and community-driven methods of extracting and curating an ontology of categorical concepts, which will then be maintained via WikiData. From this ontology, we will then build tools to do concept recognition and other semantic processing tasks. A prototype tool, led by Antonin Delpeuch, is nLab.OpenTapioca.

A screen capture from nLab.OpenTapioca. nLab.OpenTapioca takes text and annotates it by identifying categorical concepts. The concepts are WikiData entities, and each is linked to an nLab article.

To extract ontologies, we’ve been collaborating with Jacob Collard and Eswaran Subrahmanian at NIST (the US National Institute of Standards and Technology), who have built an exciting pipeline that preprocesses the text with spaCy, and then uses a root- and rule-based linguistics method (R&R) to extract concepts. You can navigate the results with their Parmesan interface:

• Parmesan nLab,
• Parmesan TAC.

A screen capture from Parmesan TAC, which displays subject-verb-object triples automatically extracted from the TAC corpus using the R&R method.

3What’s next?

At present, we’re thinking about how to further clean these corpora, and refine the R&R methods to extract more accurate and precise concepts.

Simultaneously, we’re also thinking about the word embedding models that are both used by these toolkits, and that we could use separately to refine search and other methods. A central problem is that mathematical text is quite different from standard newswire English, and so, as with any domain-specific text, we’re seeing a number of processing errors. Can we tune these better for mathematical text?

A visualisation of a word-embedding semantic model for category theory concepts, trained on the nLab corpus. The model extracts, from analysis of statistical patterns in text alone, the strong similarity between schemes, varieties, and manifolds. (Click here for a larger version of this image.)

But ultimately, as with any data-driven enterprise, the quality of the output depends crucially on the quality of the input. And so throughout this all, we’re working to improve our corpora, to more accurately capture the expertise and intuitions of mathematicians. Here, we have a request of you: please contribute your expertise and intuitions.

More precisely, we’d love some help identifying concepts in abstracts from Theory and Applications of Categories, to produce what’s known as an “annotated corpus”, which we will share openly for NLP experiments to benefit the scientific community. To contribute, just choose your favorite TAC abstract, and click the button below!

========================

well, I now would say

>This is why, for example, we broadcast and record most of our seminars live on YouTube.

because having the recordings, after the event, seems to me, more important than broadcasting the talks. our permantly available library of exciting talks

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!