animation by Marius BuligaI’m helping organize ACT 2019, an applied category theory conference and school at Oxford, July 15-26, 2019.
If you’re a grad student or postdoc interested in this subject, you should apply for the ‘school’ before January 30th. Later people can submit papers for the conference:
Dear all,
As part of a new growing community in Applied Category Theory, now with a dedicated journal Compositionality, a traveling workshop series SYCO, a forthcoming Cambridge U. Press book series Reasoning with Categories, and several one-off events including at NIST, we launch an annual conference+school series named Applied Category Theory, the coming one being at Oxford, July 15-19 for the conference, and July 22-26 for the school. The dates are chosen such that CT 2019 (Edinburgh) and the ACT 2019 conference (Oxford) will be back-to-back, for those wishing to participate in both.
There already was a successful invitation-only pilot, ACT 2018, last year at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden, also in the format of school+workshop.
For the conference, for those who are familiar with the successful QPL conference series, we will follow a very similar format for the ACT conference. This means that we will accept both new papers which then will be published in a proceedings volume (most likely a Compositionality special Proceedings issue), as well as shorter abstracts of papers published elsewhere. There will be a thorough selection process, as typical in computer science conferences. The idea is that all the best work in applied category theory will be presented at the conference, and that acceptance is something that means something, just like in CS conferences. This is particularly important for young people as it will help them with their careers.
Expect a call for submissions soon, and start preparing your papers now!
The school in ACT 2018 was unique in that small groups of students worked closely with an experienced researcher (these were John Baez, Aleks Kissinger, Martha Lewis and Pawel Sobociński), and each group ended up producing a paper. We will continue with this format or a closely related one, with Jules Hedges and Daniel Cicala as organisers this year. As there were 80 applications last year for 16 slots, we may want to try to find a way to involve more students.
We are fortunate to have a number of private sector companies closely associated in some way or another, who will also participate, with Cambridge Quantum Computing Inc. and StateBox having already made major financial/logistic contributions.
On behalf of the ACT Steering Committee,
John Baez, Bob Coecke, David Spivak, Christina Vasilakopoulou
Azimuth 
Dear John, you use one of my animations without attribution. Please remedy this. Chemlambda is an Open Science project and fair attribution is expected. I commented on this here https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/10/04/john-baez-applied-category-theory-2019-post-uses-my-animation-without-attribution/
Sure, I’ll credit you! I had this nice animation on my desktop for so long that I’d forgotten who made it. I apologize for not doing some research before using it.
No, the correct attribution is like a reference (why should I mention this?) to the github page of the chemlambda project https://github.com/chorasimilarity/chemlambda-gui/blob/gh-pages/dynamic/README.md and to the place where the simulation used for making the animation is available, i.e. https://figshare.com/articles/The_Chemlambda_collection_of_simulations/4747390
Dear John, two points:
(1) the correct reference is to the chemlambda project page https://github.com/chorasimilarity/chemlambda-gui/blob/gh-pages/dynamic/README.md (which gives to anybody the means to reproduce the simulation), the name of the molecule or even the place where is it available https://github.com/chorasimilarity/chemlambda-gui/blob/gh-pages/dynamic/mol/tape_long_4653_2.mol and the place where the simulation used for the animation is available https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4747390.v1
(2) this situation shows problems of Open Science. Indeed the chemlambda project was pursued as OS on purpose. The idea is that OS satisfies greater rigorousness criteria than previously. Instead of peer review, there is the possibility of independent validation by the reader. There are other problems which are not related to the situation at hand (like where and how can be published an article like Molecular computers http://chorasimilarity.github.io/chemlambda-gui/dynamic/molecular.html or how to handle the situation when a lazy reviewer does not use the means of validation provided by the author and instead emits an impressionistic opinion, like “not interesting for this journal”, or “how is this different than _other_article?”). But in this situation is a clear bias against OS.
Suppose that I use lemma 1.2 from yor article J. Baez, Article about blabla, Journal of Whatever 3(4) 2014. I copy-paste it and I put it in my article without any attribution. You would be completely annoyed by this and you write a note about this. As a response I add to the lemma the text (lemma by John Baez) and no reference to the article. Or suppose I use a pretty picture obtained from a real biology experiment, without exact attribution.
The comparison is not crazy, because there is no difference between a (program, it’s execution) and a (lemma, proof). In this case the initial and final molecules are the lemma and the execution according to the chemlambda so-called “stupid” algorithm is an (automated) proof.
John (or chorasimularity), you going to give us a hint about the animation? About the only behavioral regularity I see is that the feeders grow when they eat.
It also seems that red nodes are a) specific to the 1st feeder, b) not needed for splitting (the top feeder splits), and c) disappear (and maybe appear) over time.
(I suppose you’re going to tell us that this complex behavior results from some combination of adding 3 and dividing by 2:-)
chorasimilarity, I see that your link points to some additional info, thanks. (And sorry for misspelling your screen name:-).
arch1 this is a chemlambda molecule, see the project on github https://github.com/chorasimilarity/chemlambda-gui/blob/gh-pages/dynamic/README.md