## Applied Category Theory Meeting at UCR (Part 3)

15 November, 2019

We had a special session on applied category theory here at UCR:

Applied category theory, Fall Western Sectional Meeting of the AMS, 9–10 November 2019, U.C. Riverside.

I was bowled over by the large number of cool ideas. I’ll have to blog about some of them. A bunch of people stayed for a few days afterwards, and we had lots of great conversations.

The biggest news was that Brendan Fong and David Spivak definitely want to set up an applied category theory in the San Francisco Bay Area, which they’re calling the Topos Institute. They are now in the process of raising funds for this institute! I plan to be involved, so I’ll be saying more about this later.

But back to the talks. We didn’t make videos, but here are the slides. Click on talk titles to see abstracts of the talks. For a multi-author talk, the person whose name is in boldface is the one who gave the talk. You also might enjoy comparing the 2017 talks.

Saturday November 9, 2019

8:00 a.m.
Fibrations as generalized lens categoriestalk slides.
David I. Spivak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

9:00 a.m.
Supplying bells and whistles in symmetric monoidal categoriestalk slides.
Brendan Fong, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
David I. Spivak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

9:30 a.m.
Philip Hackney, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Gabriel C. Drummond-Cole, IBS Center for Geometry and Physics

10:00 a.m.
Duality of relationstalk slides.
Alexander Kurz, Chapman University

10:30 a.m.
A synthetic approach to stochastic maps, conditional independence, and theorems on sufficient statisticstalk slides.
Tobias Fritz, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

3:00 p.m.
Constructing symmetric monoidal bicategories functoriallytalk slides.
Michael Shulman, University of San Diego
Linde Wester Hansen, University of Oxford

3:30 p.m.
Structured cospanstalk slides.
Kenny Courser, University of California, Riverside
John C. Baez, University of California, Riverside

4:00 p.m.
Generalized Petri netstalk slides.
Jade Master, University of California, Riverside

4:30 p.m.
Formal composition of hybrid systemstalk slides and website.

Paul Gustafson, Wright State University
Jared Culbertson, Air Force Research Laboratory
Dan Koditschek, University of Pennsylvania
Peter Stiller, Texas A&M University

5:00 p.m.
Strings for cartesian bicategoriestalk slides.
M. Andrew Moshier, Chapman University

5:30 p.m.
Defining and programming generic compositions in symmetric monoidal categoriestalk slides.
Dmitry Vagner, Los Angeles, CA

Sunday November 10, 2019

8:00 a.m.
Mathematics for second quantum revolutiontalk slides.
Zhenghan Wang, UCSB and Microsoft Station Q

9:00 a.m.
A compositional and statistical approach to natural languagetalk slides.

9:30 a.m.
Exploring invariant structure in neural activity with applied topology and category theorytalk slides.
Krista Perks, UC San Diego
Timothy Q Gentner, UC San Diego

10:00 a.m.
Of monks, lawyers and villages: new insights in social network science — talk cancelled due to illness.
Nina Otter, Mathematics Department, UCLA
Mason A. Porter, Mathematics Department, UCLA

10:30 a.m.
Functorial cluster embeddingtalk slides.

Steve Huntsman, BAE Systems FAST Labs

2:00 p.m.
Quantitative equational logictalk slides.
Prakash Panangaden, School of Computer Science, McGill University
Gordon D. Plotkin, University of Edinburgh

3:00 p.m.
Brakes: an example of applied category theorytalk slides in PDF and Powerpoint.
Eswaran Subrahmanian, Carnegie Mellon University / National Institute of Standards and Technology

3:30 p.m.
Intuitive robotic programming using string diagramstalk slides.
Blake S. Pollard, National Institute of Standards and Technology

4:00 p.m.
Metrics on functor categoriestalk slides.
Vin de Silva, Department of Mathematics, Pomona College

4:30 p.m.
Hausdorff and Wasserstein metrics on graphs and other structured datatalk slides.
Evan Patterson, Stanford University

## Quantales from Petri Nets

6 October, 2019

A referee pointed out this paper to me:

• Uffe Engberg and Glynn Winskel, Petri nets as models of linear logic, in Colloquium on Trees in Algebra and Programming, Springer, Berlin, 1990, pp. 147–161.

It contains a nice observation: we can get a commutative quantale from any Petri net.

I’ll explain how in a minute. But first, what does have to do with linear logic?

In linear logic, propositions form a category where the morphisms are proofs and we have two kinds of ‘and’: $\&$, which is a cartesian product on this category, and $\otimes$, which is a symmetric monoidal structure. There’s much more to linear logic than this (since there are other connectives), and maybe also less (since we may want our category to be a mere poset), but never mind. I want to focus on the weird business of having two kinds of ‘and’.

Since $\&$ is cartesian we have $P \Rightarrow P \& P$ as usual in logic.

But since $\otimes$ is not cartesian we usually don’t have $P \Rightarrow P \otimes P.$ This other kind of ‘and’ is about resources: from one copy of a thing $P$ you can’t get two copies.

Here’s one way to think about it: if $P$ is “I have a sandwich”, $P \& P$ is like “I have a sandwich and I have a sandwich”, while $P \otimes P$ is like “I have two sandwiches”.

A commutative quantale captures these two forms of ‘and’, and more. A commutative quantale is a commutative monoid object in the category of cocomplete posets: that is, posets where every subset has a least upper bound. But it’s a fact that any cocomplete poset is also complete: every subset has a greatest lower bound!

If we think of the elements of our commutative quantale as propositions, we interpret $x \le y$ as “$x$ implies $y$”. The least upper bound of any subset of proposition is their ‘or’. Their greatest lower bound is their ‘and’. But we also have the commutative monoid operation, which we call $\otimes.$ This operation distributes over least upper bounds.

So, a commutative quantale has both the logical $\&$ (not just for pairs of propositions, but arbitrary sets of them) and the $\otimes$ operation that describes combining resources.

To get from a Petri net to a commutative quantale, we can compose three functors.

First, any Petri net gives a commutative monoidal category—that is, a commutative monoid object in $\mathsf{Cat}$. Indeed, my student Jade has analyzed this in detail and shown the resulting functor from the category of Petri nets to the category of commutative monoidal categories is a left adjoint:

• Jade Master, Generalized Petri nets, Section 4.

Second, any category gives a poset where we say $x \le y$ if there is a morphism from $x$ to $y.$ Moreover, the resulting functor $\mathsf{Cat} \to \mathsf{Poset}$ preserves products. As a result, every commutative monoidal category gives a commutative monoidal poset: that is, a commutative monoid object in the category of Posets.

Composing these two functors, every Petri net gives a commutative monoidal poset. Elements are of this poset are markings of the Petri net, the partial order is “reachability”, and the commutative monoid structure is addition markings.

Third, any poset $P$ gives another poset $\widehat{P}$ whose elements are downsets of $P$: that is, subsets $S \subseteq P$ such that

$x \in S, y \le x \; \implies \; y \in S$

The partial order on downsets is inclusion. This new poset $\widehat{P}$ is ‘better’ than $P$ because it’s cocomplete. That is, any union of downsets is again a downset. Moreover, $\widehat{P}$ contains $P$ as a sub-poset. The reason is that each $x \in P$ gives a downset

$\downarrow x = \{y \in P : \; y \le x \}$

and clearly

$x \le y \; \iff \; \downarrow x \subseteq \downarrow y$

Composing this third functor with the previous two, every Petri net gives a commutative monoid object in the category of cocomplete posets. But this is just a commutative quantale!

What is this commutative quantale like? Its elements are downsets of markings of our Petri net: sets of markings such that if $x$ is in the set and $x$ is reachable from $y$ then $y$ is also in the set.

It’s good to contemplate this a bit more. A marking can be seen as a ‘resource’. For example, if our Petri net has a place in it called sandwich there is a marking 2sandwich, which means you have two sandwiches. Downsets of markings are sets of markings such that if $x$ is in the set and $x$ is reachable from $y$ then $y$ is also in the set! An example of a downset would be “a sandwich, or anything that can give you a sandwich”. Another is “two sandwiches, or anything that can give you two sandwiches”.

The tensor product $\otimes$ comes from addition of markings, extended in the obvious way to downsets of markings. For example, “a sandwich, or anything that can give you a sandwich” tensored with “a sandwich, or anything that can give you a sandwich” equals “two sandwiches, or anything that can give you two sandwiches”.

On the other hand, the cartesian product $\&$ is the logical ‘and’:
if you have “a sandwich, or anything that can give you a sandwich” and you have “a sandwich, or anything that can give you a sandwich”, then you just have “a sandwich, or anything that can give you a sandwich”.

So that’s the basic idea.

## Applied Category Theory Meeting at UCR (Part 2)

30 September, 2019

Joe Moeller and I have finalized the schedule of our meeting on applied category theory:

Applied Category Theory, special session of the Fall Western Sectional Meeting of the AMS, U. C. Riverside, Riverside, California, 9–10 November 2019.

It’s going to be really cool, with talks on everything from brakes to bicategories, from quantum physics to social networks, and more—with the power of category theory as the unifying theme!

You can get information on registration, hotels and such here. If you’re coming, you might also want to attend Eugenia Cheng‘s talk on the afternoon of Friday November 8th.   I’ll announce the precise title and time of her talk, and also the location of all the following talks, as soon as I know!

In what follows, the person actually giving the talk has an asterisk by their name. You can click on talk titles to see abstracts of the talks.

Saturday November 9, 2019, 8:00 a.m.-10:50 a.m.

• 8:00 a.m.David I. Spivak*, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 9:00 a.m.Brendan Fong*, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
David I. Spivak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 9:30 a.m.Gabriel C. Drummond-Cole, IBS Center for Geometry and Physics
Philip Hackney*, Department of Mathematics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
• 10:00 a.m.
Duality of relations.
Alexander Kurz*, Chapman University
• 10:30 a.m.Tobias Fritz*, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Saturday November 9, 2019, 3:00 p.m.-5:50 p.m.

Sunday November 10, 2019, 8:00 a.m.-10:50 a.m.

Sunday November 10, 2019, 2:00 p.m.-4:50 p.m.

## Structured Cospans

1 July, 2019

My grad student Kenny Courser gave a talk at the 4th Symposium on Compositional Structures. He spoke about his work with Christina Vasilakopolou and me. We’ve come up with a theory that can handle a broad class of open systems, from electrical circuits to chemical reaction networks to Markov processes and Petri nets. The idea is to treat open systems as morphisms in a category of a particular kind: a ‘structured cospan category’.

Here is his talk:

• Kenny Courser, Structured cospans.

In July 11th I’m going to talk about structured cospans at the big annual category theory conference, CT2019:

• John Baez, Structured cospans.

I borrowed more than just the title from Kenny’s talk… but since I’m an old guy, they’re giving me time to say more stuff. For full details, try Kenny’s thesis:

This thesis is not quite in its final form, so I won’t try to explain it all now. But it’s full of great stuff, so I hope you look at it! If you have any questions or corrections please let us know.

We’ve been working on this project for a couple of years, so there’s a lot to say… but right now let me just tell you what a ‘structured cospan’ is.

Suppose you have any functor $L \colon \mathsf{A} \to \mathsf{X}.$ Then a structured cospan is a diagram like this:

For example if $L \colon \mathsf{A} \to \mathsf{X}$ is the functor from sets to graphs sending each set to the graph with that set of vertices and no edges, a structured cospan looks like this:

It’s a graph with two sets getting mapped into its set of vertices. I call this an open graph. Or if $L \colon \mathsf{A} \to \mathsf{X}$ is the functor from sets to Petri nets sending each set to the Petri having that set of places and nothing else, a structured cospan looks like this:

• John Baez, Open Petri nets, Azimuth, 15 August 2018.

It illustrates many ideas from the general theory of structured cospans: for example, what we do with them.

You may have heard of a similar idea: ‘decorated cospans’, invented by Brendan Fong. You may wonder what’s the difference!

Kenny’s talk explains the difference pretty well. Basically, decorated cospans that look isomorphic may not be technically isomorphic. For example, if we have an open graph like this:

and its set of edges is $\{a,b,c,d\},$ this is not isomorphic to the identical-looking open graph whose set of edges is $\{b,c,d,e\}.$ That’s right: the names of the edges matter!

This is an annoying glitch in the formalism. As Kenny’s talk explains, structured cospans don’t suffer from this problem.

My talk at CT2019 explains another way to fix this problem: using a new improved concept of decorated cospan! This new improved concept gives results that match those coming from structured cospan in many cases. Proving this uses some nice theorems proved by Kenny Courser, Christina Vasilakopoulou and also Daniel Cicala.

But I think structured cospans are simpler than decorated cospans. They get the job done more easily in most cases, though they don’t handle everything that decorated cospans do.

I’ll be saying more about structured cospans as time goes on. The basic theorem, in case you’re curious but don’t want to look at my talk, is this:

Theorem. Let $\mathsf{A}$ be a category with finite coproducts, $\mathsf{X}$ a category with finite colimits, and $L \colon \mathsf{A} \to \mathsf{X}$ a functor preserving finite coproducts. Then there is a symmetric monoidal category ${}_L \mathsf{Csp}(\mathsf{X})$ where:

• an object is an object of $\mathsf{A}$
• a morphism is an isomorphism class of structured cospans:

Here two structured cospans are isomorphic if there is a commutative diagram of this form:

If you don’t want to work with isomorphism classes of structured cospans, you can use a symmetric monoidal bicategory where the 1-morphisms are actual structured cospans. But following ideas of Mike Shulman, it’s easier to work with a symmetric monoidal double category. So:

Theorem. Let $\mathsf{A}$ be a category with finite coproducts, $\mathsf{X}$ a category with finite colimits, and $L \colon \mathsf{A} \to \mathsf{X}$ a functor preserving finite coproducts. Then there is a symmetric monoidal double category ${_L \mathbb{C}\mathbf{sp}(\mathsf{X})}$ where:

• an object is an object of $\mathsf{A}$
• a vertical 1-morphism is a morphism of $\mathsf{A}$
• a horizontal 1-cell is a structured cospan

• a 2-morphism is a commutative diagram

## Props in Network Theory (Part 2)

14 May, 2019

Here’s my talk for SYCO4 next week:

Abstract. To describe systems composed of interacting parts, scientists and engineers draw diagrams of networks: flow charts, Petri nets, electrical circuit diagrams, signal-flow graphs, chemical reaction networks, Feynman diagrams and the like. All these different diagrams fit into a common framework: the mathematics of symmetric monoidal categories. Two complementary approaches are presentations of props using generators and relations (which are more algebraic in flavor) and structured cospan categories (which are more geometrical). In this talk we focus on the former. A “prop” is a strict symmetric monoidal category whose objects are tensor powers of a single generating object. We will see that props are a flexible tool for describing many kinds of networks.

You can read a lot more here:

• John Baez, Props in network theory (part 1), Azimuth, April 27, 2018.

## The Pi Calculus: Towards Global Computing

4 April, 2019

Check out the video of Christian Williams’’s talk in the Applied Category Theory Seminar here at U. C. Riverside. It was nicely edited by Paola Fernandez and uploaded by Joe Moeller.

Abstract. Historically, code represents a sequence of instructions for a single machine. Each computer is its own world, and only interacts with others by sending and receiving data through external ports. As society becomes more interconnected, this paradigm becomes more inadequate – these virtually isolated nodes tend to form networks of great bottleneck and opacity. Communication is a fundamental and integral part of computing, and needs to be incorporated in the theory of computation.

To describe systems of interacting agents with dynamic interconnection, in 1980 Robin Milner invented the pi calculus: a formal language in which a term represents an open, evolving system of processes (or agents) which communicate over names (or channels). Because a computer is itself such a system, the pi calculus can be seen as a generalization of traditional computing languages; there is an embedding of lambda into pi – but there is an important change in focus: programming is less like controlling a machine and more like designing an ecosystem of autonomous organisms.

We review the basics of the pi calculus, and explore a variety of examples which demonstrate this new approach to programming. We will discuss some of the history of these ideas, called “process algebra”, and see exciting modern applications in blockchain and biology.

“… as we seriously address the problem of modelling mobile communicating systems we get a sense of completing a model which was previously incomplete; for we can now begin to describe what goes on outside a computer in the same terms as what goes on inside – i.e. in terms of interaction. Turning this observation inside-out, we may say that we inhabit a global computer, an informatic world which demands to be understood just as fundamentally as physicists understand the material world.” — Robin Milner

The talks slides are here.

• Robin Milner, The polyadic pi calculus: a tutorial.

• Robin Milner, Communicating and Mobile Systems.

• Joachim Parrow, An introduction to the pi calculus.

## Social Contagion Modeled on Random Networks

29 March, 2019

Check out the video of Daniel Cicala’s talk, the fourth in the Applied Category Theory Seminar here at U. C. Riverside. It was nicely edited by Paola Fernandez and uploaded by Joe Moeller.

Abstract. A social contagion may manifest as a cultural trend, a spreading opinion or idea or belief. In this talk, we explore a simple model of social contagion on a random network. We also look at the effect that network connectivity, edge distribution, and heterogeneity has on the diffusion of a contagion.

The talk slides are here.