Category theory has been “applied” in one sense or another since the beginning. Eilenberg himself studied automata theory. But the applied category theory community as it currently exists formally coalesced in 2018. All at once, we had the first instance of the Applied Category Theory conference, the accompanying Adjoint School, and the announcement of the journal Compositionality.
I was a student in the first Adjoint School, and so were a bunch of people I consider friends now.
Then I got to be a mentor in the fifth Adjoint School.
Now I’m honored to be contributing to the adjoint school in another way. I am on the organizing committee for this year’s ACT conference. I’m the member of the committee primarily responsible for all things related to the physical space including choosing the location and booking the space. Since the Adjoint School and the ACT conference are always co-located, one week apart, I also acquired space for them on the UMD campus.
So now the 2023 instance of the Adjoint School kicked off yesterday (at the time I’m writing this), and it looks like it’s going to be very interesting. The mentors and their projects are:
- Priyaa Srinivasan – Message Passing Logic for Categorical Quantum Mechanics
- Barbara König – Behavioural Metrics, Quantitative Logics, and Coalgebras
- Chris Heunen – Concurrency in monoidal categories
- Dan Marsden – Game Comonads and Finite Model Theory
Just as a side note, Priyaa is my friend and coworker at NIST, and she’s going to start a new position at the Topos Institute right after the conference is done. Congrats!
Joe Moeller 