Symposium on Compositional Structures

As I type this, sitting in a lecture hall at the Lorentz Center, Jamie Vicary, University of Birmingham and University of Oxford, is announcing a new series of meetings:

• Symposium on Compositional Structures.

The website, which will probably change, currently says this:

Symposium on Compositional Structures (SYCO)

The Symposium on Compositional Structures is a new interdisciplinary meeting aiming to support the growing community of researchers interested in the phenomenon of compositionality, from both applied and abstract perspectives, and in particular where category theory serves as a unifying common language.

We welcome submissions from researchers across computer science, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and beyond, with the aim of fostering discussion, disseminating new ideas, and spreading knowledge of open problems between fields. Submission is encouraged for both mature research and work in progress, and by both established academics and junior researchers, including students. The meeting does not have proceedings.

While no list of topics could be exhaustive, SYCO welcomes submissions with a compositional focus related any the following areas, in particular from the perspective of category theory:

• logical methods in computer science, including quantum and classical programming, concurrency, natural language processing and machine learning;

• graphical calculi, including string diagrams, Petri nets and reaction networks;

• languages and frameworks, including process algebras, proof nets, type theory and game semantics;

• abstract algebra and pure category theory, including monoidal category theory, higher category theory, operads, polygraphs, and relationships to homotopy theory;

• quantum algebra, including quantum computation and representation theory;

• tools and techniques, including rewriting, formal proofs and proof assistants;

• industrial applications, including case studies and real-world problem descriptions.

Meetings

Meetings will involve both invited and contributed talks. The first meeting is planned for Autumn 2018, with more details to follow soon.

Funding

Some funding may be available to support travel and subsistence, especially for junior researchers who are speaking at the meeting.

Steering committee

The symposium is managed by the following people:

• Ross Duncan, University of Strathclyde. • Chris Heunen, University of Edinburgh. • Aleks Kissinger, Radboud University Nijmegen. • Samuel Mimram, École Polytechnique. • Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary. • Pawel Sobocinski, University of Southampton. • Jamie Vicary, University of Birmingham and University of Oxford.