I’m running a special session on applied category theory, and now the program is available:
• Applied category theory, Fall Western Sectional Meeting of the AMS, 4-5 November 2017, U.C. Riverside.
This is going to be fun.
My former student Brendan Fong is now working with David Spivak at MIT, and they’re both coming. My collaborator John Foley at Metron is also coming: we’re working on the CASCADE project for designing networked systems.
Dmitry Vagner is coming from Duke: he wrote a paper with David and Eugene Lerman on operads and open dynamical systems. Christina Vaisilakopoulou, who has worked with David and Patrick Schultz on dynamical systems, has just joined our group at UCR, so she will also be here. And the three of them have worked with Ryan Wisnesky on algebraic databases. Ryan will not be here, but his colleague Peter Gates will: together with David they have a startup called Categorical Informatics, which uses category theory to build sophisticated databases.
That’s not everyone—for example, most of my students will be speaking at this special session, and other people too—but that gives you a rough sense of some people involved. The conference is on a weekend, but John Foley and David Spivak and Brendan Fong and Dmitry Vagner are staying on for longer, so we’ll have some long conversations… and Brendan will explain decorated corelations in my Tuesday afternoon network theory seminar.
Here’s the program. Click on talk titles to see abstracts. For a multi-author talk, the person with the asterisk after their name is doing the talking. All the talks will be in Room 268 of the Highlander Union Building or ‘HUB’.
Saturday November 4, 2017, 9:00 a.m.-10:50 a.m.
9:00 a.m.
A higher-order temporal logic for dynamical systems.
David I. Spivak, MIT
10:00 a.m.
Algebras of open dynamical systems on the operad of wiring diagrams.
Dmitry Vagner*, Duke University
David I. Spivak, MIT
Eugene Lerman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
10:30 a.m.
Abstract dynamical systems.
Christina Vasilakopoulou*, University of California, Riverside
David Spivak, MIT
Patrick Schultz, MIT
Saturday November 4, 2017, 3:00 p.m.-5:50 p.m.
3:00 p.m.
Black boxes and decorated corelations.
Brendan Fong, MIT
4:00 p.m.
Compositional modelling of open reaction networks.
Blake S. Pollard*, University of California, Riverside
John C. Baez, University of California, Riverside
4:30 p.m.
A bicategory of coarse-grained Markov processes.
Kenny Courser, University of California, Riverside
5:00 p.m.
A bicategorical syntax for pure state qubit quantum mechanics.
Daniel M. Cicala, University of California, Riverside
5:30 p.m.
Open systems in classical mechanics.
Adam Yassine, University of California Riverside
Sunday November 5, 2017, 9:00 a.m.-10:50 a.m.
9:00 a.m.
Controllability and observability: diagrams and duality.
Jason Erbele, Victor Valley College
9:30 a.m.
Frobenius monoids, weak bimonoids, and corelations.
Brandon Coya, University of California, Riverside
10:00 a.m.
Compositional design and tasking of networks.
John D. Foley*, Metron, Inc.
John C. Baez, University of California, Riverside
Joseph Moeller, University of California, Riverside
Blake S. Pollard, University of California, Riverside
10:30 a.m.
Operads for modeling networks.
Joseph Moeller*, University of California, Riverside
John Foley, Metron Inc.
John C. Baez, University of California, Riverside
Blake S. Pollard, University of California, Riverside
Sunday November 5, 2017, 2:00 p.m.-4:50 p.m.
2:00 p.m.
Reeb graph smoothing via cosheaves.
Vin de Silva, Department of Mathematics, Pomona College
3:00 p.m.
Knowledge representation in bicategories of relations.
Evan Patterson*, Stanford University, Statistics Department
3:30 p.m.
The multiresolution analysis of flow graphs.
Steve Huntsman*, BAE Systems
4:00 p.m.
Data modeling and integration using the open source tool Algebraic Query Language (AQL).
Peter Y. Gates*, Categorical Informatics
Ryan Wisnesky, Categorical Informatics
The second to last speaker on Sunday had to cancel:
4:00 p.m.
Categorical logic as a foundation for reasoning under uncertainty.
Ralph L. Wojtowicz*, Shepherd University
Thus, the last talk on Sunday has now been moved to this 4:00 slot.
I’ve been slacking off on writing this series of posts… but for a good reason: I’ve been busy writing a paper on the same topic! In the process I caught a couple of mistakes in what I’ve said so far. But more importantly, there’s a version out now, that you can read:
• John Baez, John Foley, Blake Pollard and Joseph Moeller, Network models.
There will be two talks about this at the AMS special session on Applied Category Theory this weekend at U. C. Riverside: one by John Foley of Metron Inc., and one by my grad student Joseph Moeller. I’ll try to get their talk slides someday. But for now, here’s the basic idea.