Sunday, July 26, 2020

The curious incident of the dropped streaming

This is a picture of zoom minutes before Women in Logic 2020, the workshop associated with FSCD/IJCAR, started on 30 June 2020. This year I am *not* one of the organizers of "Women in Logic".
I had promised myself to try to do it for three years and then pass on the ball. I was thrilled to be able to pass the ball to the very competent hands of Sandra Alves, Sandra Kiefer and Ana Sokolova, the organizers this year! They did a splendid job and the workshop had 145 attendees during these trying pandemic times, a wonderful feat, if you ask me.

But we had a bit of an incident during Women in Logic 2020 this time. The workshop was going really well, when during Alexandra Silva's Invited talk ("An algebraic framework to reason about concurrency"), my chat started blipping with the organizers of FSCD/IJCAR asking "what's going on on your workshop? everything ok? YouTube took down the streaming!!! they say someone complained about the workshop". What?

I explained that there was nothing wrong happening, no zoom bombing, no glitches that we (me or the real organizers) could see, and urged them to complain to YT to get the stream back up again. YouTube eventually restarted the stream again (the next day--the workshop was one day only) and sent an unapologetic message, see below.

So yes, we don't know at all what happened. If they thought there was a trademark infringement or if some human being triggered the complaints procedure to annoy us. (some of our friends seem to think that the latter was the case!)

We have some reasons to believe that this was a childish act of sabotage:  because Alexandra had finished the CS part of her presentation and had started the discussion on why we need meetings like "Women in Logic". Initially firmly convinced that it was some sort of glitch of automatic algorithms I took on to Twitter and asked:

OK, a small typo in "down", but nothing too controversial.  Belnap's lattice, Kleene algebras and nominal type theory are perfectly good subjects in logic and computer science. The workshop was running on Zoom and was been streamed on YouTube, so the meeting carried on with further talks and a discussion at the end. But the reason for streaming the meeting was to support also people who didn't want to use zoom, and these people could not participate then.

Quite a number of people responded to my tweet.  Ian Stark asked "Do you get any indication of what YouTube judge you've infringed?" and we were told that something similar happened with POPL2019, so I wrote to Fritz Henglein to ask for information. (there wasn't much info to be had)

Sara Kalvala commented "It is completely bizarre that anyone would feel threatened by a bunch of women having a workshop on logic and complain to @youtube. Even more bizarre that @youtube would delete the video. But it won't stop us having more meetings". To this I replied "yes, totally bizarre! a small correction is that YT didn't delete the video, they simply took down the streaming. Since stopping the streaming is immediate, but reinstatement takes lots of human intervention, they put it back the next day, but the workshop was one day only!".

Anyways a small consolation (for me) was to see the comments from colleagues in FSCD/IJCAR saying "I thought you were exaggerating, guess you're right and doing the right thing!! Keep doing it!!".

And yes, I think we are doing the right thing. To begin with I was a little skeptical. I am used to being in a very masculine world, a world of very few women. I `grew up' in research being treated like one of the "lads" and not worrying too much about it. I was expecting things to improve, as numbers of women improved. But the numbers of women in logic and Computer Science not only did not improve, some of them got decidedly much worse.

Many of  the young women finishing PhDs in CS I talked to feel that a place like "Women in Logic"  made them feel less attacked, more protected and better able to speak and be themselves. And the fact that many of our sisters have been doing these meetings for more than twelve years (e.g.Women in Machine LearningWomen in Machine Learning and Data ScienceWomen in Biology, etc), with huge numbers in attendance, showed me  that I was wrong, that meetings where only women present work are sensible and helpful and a "good thing" altogether.




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