Applied Category Theory 2020 is coming up soon! After the Tutorial Day on Sunday July 6th, there will be talks from Monday July 7th to Friday July 10th. All talks will be live on Zoom and on YouTube. Recorded versions will appear on YouTube later.
Here is the program—click on it to download a more readable version:
Here are the talks! They come in three kinds: keynotes, regular presentations and short industry presentations. Within each I’ve listed them in alphabetical order by speaker: I believe the first author is the speaker.
This is gonna be fun.
Keynote presentations (35 minutes)
• Henry Adams, Johnathan Bush and Joshua Mirth, Operations on metric thickenings.
• Nicolas Blanco and Noam Zeilberger: Bifibrations of polycategories and classical linear logic.
• Bryce Clarke, Derek Elkins, Jeremy Gibbons, Fosco Loregian, Bartosz Milewski, Emily Pillmore and Mario Román: Profunctor optics, a categorical update.
• Tobias Fritz, Tomáš Gonda, Paolo Perrone and Eigil Rischel: Distribution functors, second-order stochastic dominance and the Blackwell–Sherman–Stein Theorem in categorical probability.
• Micah Halter, Evan Patterson, Andrew Baas and James Fairbanks: Compositional scientific computing with Catlab and SemanticModels.
• Joachim Kock: Whole-grain Petri nets and processes.
• Andre Kornell, Bert Lindenhovius and Michael Mislove: Quantum CPOs.
• Martha Lewis: Towards logical negation in compositional distributional semantics.
• Jade Master and John Baez: Open Petri nets.
• Lachlan McPheat, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Hadi Wazni and Gijs Wijnholds, Categorical vector space semantics for Lambek calculus with a relevant modality.
• David Jaz Myers: Double categories of open dynamical systems.
• Toby St Clere Smithe, Cyber Kittens, or first steps towards categorical cybernetics.
Regular presentations (20 minutes)
• Robert Atkey, Bruno Gavranović, Neil Ghani, Clemens Kupke, Jeremy Ledent and Fredrik Nordvall Forsberg: Compositional game theory, compositionally.
• John Baez and Kenny Courser: Coarse-graining open Markov processes.
• Georgios Bakirtzis, Christina Vasilakopoulou and Cody Fleming, Compositional cyber-physical systems modeling.
• Marco Benini, Marco Perin, Alexander Alexander Schenkel and Lukas Woike: Categorification of algebraic quantum field theories.
• Daniel Cicala: Rewriting structured cospans.
• Bryce Clarke: A diagrammatic approach to symmetric lenses.
• Bob Coecke, Giovanni de Felice, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, Alexis Toumi, Stefano Gogioso and Nicolo Chiappori: Quantum natural language processing.
• Geoffrey Cruttwell, Jonathan Gallagher and Dorette Pronk: Categorical semantics of a simple differential programming language.
• Swaraj Dash and Sam Staton: A monad for probabilistic point processes.
• Giovanni de Felice, Elena Di Lavore, Mario Román and Alexis Toumi: Functorial language games for question answering.
• Giovanni de Felice, Alexis Toumi and Bob Coecke: DisCoPy: monoidal categories in Python.
• Brendan Fong, David Jaz Myers and David I. Spivak: Behavioral mereology: a modal logic for passing constraints.
• Rocco Gangle, Gianluca Caterina and Fernando Tohme, A generic figures reconstruction of Peirce’s existential graphs (alpha).
• Jules Hedges and Philipp Zahn: Open games in practice.
• Jules Hedges: Non-compositionality in categorical systems theory.
• Michael Johnson and Robert Rosebrugh, The more legs the merrier: A new composition for symmetric (multi-)lenses.
• Joe Moeller, John Baez and John Foley: Petri nets with catalysts.
• John Nolan and Spencer Breiner, Symmetric monoidal categories with attributes.
• Joseph Razavi and Andrea Schalk: Gandy machines made easy via category theory.
• Callum Reader: Measures and enriched categories.
• Mario Román: Open diagrams via coend calculus.
• Luigi Santocanale, Dualizing sup-preserving endomaps of a complete lattice.
• Dan Shiebler: Categorical stochastic processes and likelihood.
• Richard Statman, Products in a category with only one object.
• David I. Spivak: Poly: An abundant categorical setting for mode-dependent dynamics.
• Christine Tasson and Martin Hyland, The linear-non-linear substitution 2-monad.
• Tarmo Uustalu, Niccolò Veltri and Noam Zeilberger: Proof theory of partially normal skew monoidal categories.
• Dmitry Vagner, David I. Spivak and Evan Patterson: Wiring diagrams as normal forms for computing in symmetric monoidal categories.
• Matthew Wilson, James Hefford, Guillaume Boisseau and Vincent Wang: The safari of update structures: visiting the lens and quantum enclosures.
• Paul Wilson and Fabio Zanasi: Reverse derivative ascent: a categorical approach to learning Boolean circuits.
• Vladimir Zamdzhiev: Computational adequacy for substructural lambda calculi.
• Gioele Zardini, David I. Spivak, Andrea Censi and Emilio Frazzoli: A compositional sheaf-theoretic framework for event-based systems.
Industry presentations (8 minutes)
• Arquimedes Canedo (Siemens Corporate Technology).
• Brendan Fong (Topos Institute).
• Jelle Herold (Statebox): Industrial strength CT.
• Steve Huntsman (BAE): Inhabiting the value proposition for category theory.
• Ilyas Khan (Cambridge Quantum Computing).
• Alan Ransil (Protocol Labs): Compositional data structures for the decentralized web.
• Alberto Speranzon (Honeywell).
• Ryan Wisnesky (Conexus): Categorical informatics at scale.
Azimuth 
Applied Category Theory 2020 is coming up soon…
These are fascinating but above my pay grade.
I see they will be posted to youtube later (which is good—i don’t want to sit in front of a computer for a week in summer–save them for a rainy or snowy day).
‘cyber kittens and categorical cybernetics’ has an interesting title, ‘coarse graining of open markov processes’ i may understand a bit (long time topic from R C Tolman in 1930’s), topics on language (they still look removed from the terminology used in debates between ‘innatists and connectionists’ in linguistics, and more. Pierce’s existential graphs is one topic i’ve looked at and didn’t understand or forgot. (i have seen some papers on quantum field theory applied to Chomsky’s ‘minimalist program’ in linguistics. )
I sort of wonder if any of this applied CT has any applications to all the social unrest (protests etc.) , COVID , global warming and other issues in this area or the world.
It makes me think of some farmer in france or germany in 1800s tilling the soil who wonders whether s/he should study Gauss or Galois rather than grow food.
Ishi wrote:
Yes, but a lot of the ideas in applied category theory can be used in many applications. For example: better databases (as being developed by David Spivak and Ryan Wisnewsky at Conexus), or better software for running organizations (as being developed by Jelle Herold and Fabrizio Genovese at Statebox), or open game theory for better economics.
thanks. open game theory sounds interesting.
economics is an issue in this area.
(it may be awhile before ACT goes mainstream–took quantum theory maybe 100 years.)
Bose and Einstein realized photons were bosons by 1924 and we had lasers by 1960, so it went pretty quick.
As for applied category theory, you might listen to some of these 8-minute talks at ACT2020 by people working at companies that use category theory:
• Arquimedes Canedo (Siemens Corporate Technology).
• Brendan Fong (Topos Institute).
• Jelle Herold (Statebox): Industrial strength CT.
• Steve Huntsman (BAE): Inhabiting the value proposition for category theory.
• Ilyas Khan (Cambridge Quantum Computing).
• Alan Ransil (Protocol Labs): Compositional data structures for the decentralized web.
• Alberto Speranzon (Honeywell).
• Ryan Wisnesky (Conexus): Categorical informatics at scale.