March was Qualis Time

no, not quality time. (haven't had that for ages...)

QUALIS is the system CAPES (a Brazilian funding agency) uses to measure the quality of pos-grad programmes. Since they classify journals, it ends up being an unofficial yardstick to measure all research produced in the land. Some Brazilian logicians realized that the classification was very arbitrary and we had a petition to try to influence the official arbiters.

Getting a petition going and some small amount of consensus on the classification of journals was very hard.

XV Simposio Latino Americano de Logica Matematica (SLALM2012)

Going to Bogota, Colombia today for the 15th Latin American Symposium on Mathematical Logic.
A bit worried as I don't know many people in this community, but looking forward. 

Lua at Rearden, 14 March, 2012

Roberto was Tinker Professor in Stanford at the beginning of the year, which was wonderful. Had great dinners with Noemi, Roberto  and Ana Lucia and when the girls went home, had several other opportunities to drink wine and talk shop with Roberto. I would like to know more about Lua.

So I invited Roberto to give a  Rearden University presentation in March. His abstract, with a link to his slides.

About Lua

Lua is a programming language developed at the Catholic University
in Rio de Janeiro that came to be the leading scripting language in
video games. Lua is also used extensively in embedded devices, such as
set-top boxes and TVs, and other applications like Adobe Lightroom and
Wikipedia. In this talk we will see where Lua is being used, why Lua is
being used, and what makes Lua special.

Roberto Ierusalimschy is Associate Professor at the Pontifical Catholic
University in Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and the leading architect of the
Lua programming language. Currently he is a Tinker Visiting Professor
at Stanford.

They're having their workshop this November at Verisign.

15th SLALM, Bogota, Colombia coming soon...

I was amazed that the serious and mostly model theoretical  logicians organizing the 15th Simposio Latino Americano de Logica Matematica (Latin American Mathematical Logic Symposium), started by no other than Abraham Robinson and supported by the ASL (The Association for Symbolic Logic), decided to invite me to be a Plenary Speaker. I was so amazed that I said yes.

Now I worry about how not to squander this opportunity to tell them all about the wonders of Categorical Logic.

Women of Vision: Anita Borg's Award Dinner, May, 10, 2012

My friends at Santa Clara University invited me to the Anita Borg's Institute Women of Vision Awards dinner. Again. This is so nice of them!

I loved the awards dinner the three times that I've been invited to. It's amazing to see the amount of energy and good buzz created by almost 800 women who love technology. (On the other hand one always ends up feeling a little inadequate, I must say...)

One of the most exciting things I learnt about was in my own table, The Frugal Innovation Lab. Need to find a way to collaborate with them!

Symposium on Empowering Digital Self Determination: MediaX Stanford, 9 May, 20129

Thanks to my friend Jessica, I got invited to the MediaX symposium and had a great time.

Great discussions and met many interesting people, as well as seeing some old friends. I cannot find their schedule online. So I will have to write down sometime later the papers that I want to read, from the handout.

Infinite Possibilities Conference, UMBC, Maryland, March 2012

I was very chuffed at being asked to be a Plenary Speaker at IPC2012.
It was great fun seeing so many young women  who love mathematics.
Their  stories were inspiring too.

I gave one short talk about becoming a mathematician and one plenary on "Edwardian Proofs for Futuristic Programs". I need to write a blog post about why I chose this theme.

I was also very humbled by meeting the women that started many of the movements to get us the AWM and other support associations. But the cherry on the top was hanging out with my friend Rehana that I hadn't seen in quite a few years.