Third Symposium on Compositional Structures (SYCO 3)

University of Oxford, UK
27-28 March 2019

The Symposium on Compositional Structures is a new interdisciplinary series of meetings 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 friendly discussion, disseminating new ideas, and spreading knowledge between fields. Submission is encouraged for both mature research and work in progress, and by both established academics and junior researchers, including students.

Submission is easy, with no format requirements or page restrictions. The meeting does not have proceedings, so work can be submitted even if it has been submitted or published elsewhere. You could submit work-in-progress, or a recently completed paper, or even a PhD or Masters thesis.

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

logical methods in computer science, including classical and quantum programming, type theory, 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, and game theory;
industrial applications, including case studies and real-world problem descriptions.

This new series aims to bring together the communities behind many previous successful events which have taken place over the last decade, including Categories, Logic and Physics, Categories, Logic and Physics (Scotland), Higher-Dimensional Rewriting and Applications, String Diagrams in Computational, Logic and Physics, Applied Category Theory, Simons Workshop on Compositionality, the Yorkshire and Midlands Category Theory Seminar, and the Peripatetic Seminar in Sheaves and Logic.

This event follows SYCO 1 held in Birmingham in September 2018, and SYCO 2 held in Strathclyde in December 2018. The subsequent event will be SYCO 4 in Los Angeles in May 2019.

Invited speakers


Marie Kerjean	Alessandra Palmigiano
INRIA Bretagne Atlantique, Equipe Gallinette	Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology Department of Pure and Applied Mathematics, University of Johannesburg
Differentiating proofs and programs	From parametricity to modularity and back in correspondence theory: preliminary considerations

Best student presentation award

Maaike Zwart

University of Oxford

Don’t try this at home: No-Go Theorems for Distributive Laws
(joint work with Dan Marsden)

Important dates

All deadlines are 23:59 anywhere-on-earth on the given dates.

~~Submission deadline: Friday 15 February~~
~~Author notification: Wednesday 27 February~~
~~Travel support application deadline: Wednesday 13 March~~
~~Registration deadline: Wednesday 20 March~~
~~Symposium dates: Wednesday 27 March and Thursday 28 March 2019~~

Schedule

Time	Tuesday 26 March
19:30	Pre-meeting drinks, The Royal Oak, 42-44 Woodstock Rd

Time	Wednesday 27 March	Thursday 28 March
9:30–10:00		Marie Kerjean, "Differentiating proofs and programs" (invited talk) (slides)
10:00–10:30
10:30–11:00	REGISTRATION	Mario Alvarez-Picallo and C.-H. Luke Ong, "Change Actions: Models of Generalised Differentiation" (slides)
11:00–11:30	REGISTRATION	BREAK
11:30–12:00	Alessandra Palmigiano, "From parametricity to modularity and back in correspondence theory: preliminary considerations" (invited talk) (slides)	Chad Nester, "Constructing Cryptocurrency Ledgers with Monoidal Categories" (slides)
12:00–12:30		Antonin Delpeuch, "Autonomization of monoidal categories" (slides)
12:30–13:00	Chase Bednarz, "Occlusion Operads for Image Segmentation" (slides)	Thorsten Altenkirch, "Naturality for free – the category interpretation of directed type theory" (slides)
13:00–13:30	LUNCH	LUNCH
13:30–14:00		LUNCH
14:00–14:30	Maaike Zwart and Dan Marsden, "Don't Try This at Home: No-Go Theorems for Distributive Laws" (slides)	Sharwin Rezagholi, Tobias Fritz and Paolo Perrone, "The support is a morphism of monads" (slides)
14:30–15:00	Lukas Heidemann, Nick Hu and Jamie Vicary, "Introducing homotopy.io" (slides)	Neil Ghani, Clemens Kupke, Alasdair Lambert and Fredrik Nordvall Forsberg, "Compositional Game Theory with Mixed Strategies: Probabilistic Open Games" (slides)
15:00–15:30	Martha Lewis, "Compositionality for Recursive Neural Networks" (slides)	Stefano Gogioso, "Categorical Quantum Dynamics" (slides)
15:30–16:00	BREAK
16:00–16:30	Tai-Danae Bradley, Martha Lewis, Jade Master and Bradley Theilman, "Translating and Evolving: Towards a Model of Language Change in DisCoCat" (slides)
16:30–17:00	Fosco Loregian and Ivan Di Liberti, "On the unicity of formal category theories"
17:00–17:30	Samson Abramsky, Rui Soares Barbosa, Martti Karvonen and Shane Mansfield, "A comonadic view of simulation and quantum resources" (slides)
17:30–18:30	DRINKS RECEPTION
18:30–	PUB DINNER

Recordings

Photos

Here are some photographs of the event.

Alasdair Lambert

Alessandra Palmigiano

Antonin Delpeuch

Chad Nester

Chase Bednarz

Jamie Vicary

Maaike Zwart

Marie Kerjean

Mario Alvarez-Picallo

Martha Lewis

Martti Karvonen

Sharwin Rezagholi

Stefano Gogioso

Thorsten Altenkirch

Registration

Registrations are still accepted but the amount of food and refreshments we can provide may be limited.

Please register by filling in the registration form. There is no registration fee, but please register so that we can order the right amount of catering, and give you a badge.

Local information

The local organizers are Fatimah Ahmadi, Christopher Dean, Antonin Delpeuch, Jean-Simon Lemay, Benjamin Musto and David Reutter.

Venue. The meeting will take place at the University of Oxford in Lecture Theatre B of the Department of Computer Science which can be accessed from Keble Road.

Accommodation.

A number of colleges offer spare rooms which are very well located and quite affordable.
It is also worth considering AirBNB.
B&Bs can also be found at Oxford Bed and Breakfast, Abodes of Oxford, TripAdvisor and Booking.com
The Cotswold Lodge Hotel is within walking distance.
The Old Parsonage Hotel is more luxurious and also very close to the venue.

Trains Oxford Station is 20 minutes walk from the venue. More information on times and fares can be found at National Rail Enquiries and TheTrainLine.

Planes Oxford is well connected to both London Heathrow and London Gatwick airports. The Airline bus service from Heathrow to Oxford takes approximately 90 minutes. The Airline bus service from Gatwick to Oxford takes about 2½ hours. National Rail also connects all these airports to Oxford.

Birmingham airport is also connected to Oxford by National Express and National Rail services.

Coaches Oxford Gloucester Green Bus Station is 15 minutes walk from the venue. National Express services connect Oxford to many other locations. The Oxford Tube and X90 services both connect Oxford to central London including London Victoria and take about 90 minutes. They take slightly different routes. See Oxford Tube route information and X90 Route Information.

Cars Parking in central Oxford is extremely limited. There are a number of Park and Ride locations. Buses from Pear Tree and Water Eaton stop quite close to the venue.

Local Buses Information on local buses can be found at the Oxford Bus Company. Buses now accept contactless payment (using, for example, contactless credit card or ApplePay) and no preliminary setup is required.

Taxis There are taxi ranks at Gloucester Green Bus Station and Oxford Station. A1 Taxis can be booked by phone at 01865 248 000 or booked online.

Internet access. The best way to access the internet is by using the Eduroam service; you can download a configuration tool for your device here. If you do not have access to Eduroam, please ask for login details at the registration desk.

Sponsorship

We are pleased to acknowledge financial support from EPSRC.

Deferral

The intention is for SYCO to be a community meeting, where people have enough time to explain their ideas, and with a friendly and non-competitive atmosphere. To encourage this, in the event that more submissions are received of an acceptable standard than can be accommodated in the timetable, the programme committee may choose to defer some submissions to a future meeting, rather than reject them. This would be done based largely on submission order, giving an incentive for early submission, but would also take into account other requirements, such as ensuring a broad and inclusive scientific programme. Deferred submissions can then be re-submitted to any future SYCO meeting, where they will be prioritised for inclusion in the programme, and where they will not need to be re-reviewed. Meetings are held sufficiently frequently to avoid a backlog of deferred papers.

Submissions

Submission is now closed.

Submissions should present research results in sufficient detail to allow them to be properly considered by members of the programme committee, who will assess their interest to the SYCO community. We encourage the submission of work in progress, as well as mature results. There are no proceedings, so work can be submitted even if it has been previously published, or has been submitted for consideration elsewhere. There is no specific formatting requirement, and no page limit, although for long submissions authors should be aware that reviewers will not be able to read the entire document in detail. Think creatively—you could submit a recent paper, or a draft notes of a project in progress, or even a recent Masters or PhD thesis.

If you have a submission which was deferred from a previous SYCO meeting, it will not automatically be considered for SYCO 3; you still need to submit it again through EasyChair. Such a submission will be prioritised for inclusion in the SYCO 3 programme. When submitting, enter the author and title information as usual into the EasyChair submission form, but in the "abstract" field, just state that it is a deferred submission, and give the meeting and submission number where it was originally reviewed. There is no need to attach any documents, but you can if you like, for example if the work has developed since the previous submission; in this case, please give a one-sentence summary in the "Abstract" field of the EasyChair submission form of the way it has changed.

Travel support

Some funding is available to cover travel and subsistence costs, with a priority for PhD students and junior researchers. To apply for this funding, please contact the local organizer Antonin Delpeuch (antonin.delpeuch@cs.ox.ac.uk) with subject line "SYCO 3 funding request" by 13 March, with a short statement of your current status, travel costs and funding required

Participants

In total 73 participants (66 listed below)

Samson Abramsky, University of Oxford

Fatimah Ahmadi, University of Oxford

Thorsten Altenkirch, University of Nottingham

Mario Alvarez-Picallo, University of Oxford

Pablo Andres-Martinez, University of Edinburgh

Miriam Backens, University of Oxford

Chase Bednarz, Northwestern University

Nicolas Blanco

Vikraman Choudhury, University of Cambridge, Indiana University

Bob Coecke, University of Oxford

Christopher Dean, University of Oxford

Antonin Delpeuch, University of Oxford

Elena Di Lavore, University of Oxford

Ivan Di Liberti, Masaryk University

Nuiok Dicaire, University of Edinburgh

Davide di Micco, Università degli Studi di Milano

Maximilian Doré, LMU Munich

Bruno Gavranović, University of Zagreb

Stefano Gogioso, University of Oxford

Peter Guthmann, University of Leicester

Jules Hedges, University of Oxford

Nick Hu, University of Oxford

Martti Karvonen, University of Edinburgh

Marie Kerjean, INRIA Bretagne Atlantique, Equipe Gallinette

Vitaly Kurin, University of Oxford

Alasdair Lambert, University of Strathclyde

Martha Lewis, University of Amsterdam

Eliana Lorch, University of Oxford

Carol Mak, University of Oxford

Shane Mansfield, LIP6, Sorbonne Université

Dan Marsden, University of Oxford

Benjamin Musto, University of Oxford

Chad Nester, University of Edinburgh

Fredrik Nordvall Forsberg, University of Strathclyde

Adam Ó Conghaile, Cambridge

Alessandra Palmigiano, Delft University of Technology, University of Johannesburg

Simona Paoli, University of Leicester

Paolo Perrone, Max Planck Institute

Robin Piedeleu, University College London

Nicola Pinzani, University of Oxford

Stuart Presnell, University of Bristol

Adam Przepiórkowski, University of Warsaw, Polish Academy of Sciences, University of Oxford

David Reutter, University of Oxford

Sharwin Rezagholi, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences

Alex Rice, University of Oxford

Mario Román, University of Oxford

Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London

Nick Sale, University of Oxford

Igor Siveroni, Imperial College London

Andrew Smith, University of Leicester

Toby Smithe, University of Oxford

Rui Soares Barbosa, University of Oxford

Sam Staton, University of Oxford

Shaun Steenkamp, University of Cambridge

Dario Stein, University of Oxford

Markus Strasser

Calin Tataru, University of Oxford

Dominic Verdon, University of Bristol

Jamie Vicary, University of Birmingham and University of Oxford

Dominik Wagner, University of Oxford

Harny Wang, University of Oxford

Yanying Wu, University of Oxford

Si Yu How, University of Oxford

Noam Zeilberger, University of Birmingham

Stefan Zetzsche, PhD Student

Maaike Zwart, University of Oxford

Programme committee

Fatimah Ahmadi, University of Oxford
Miriam Backens, University of Oxford
Corina Cirstea, University of Southampton
Bob Coecke, University of Oxford
Carmen Maria Constantin, University of Oxford
Antonin Delpeuch, University of Oxford
Brendan Fong, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dan Ghica, University of Birmingham
Giuseppe Greco, Utrecht University
Helle Hvid Hansen, Delft University of Technology
Jules Hedges, University of Oxford
Chris Heunen, University of Edinburgh
Dominic Horsman, University of Grenoble
Dimitri Kartsaklis, Apple
Kohei Kishida, Dalhousie University
Aleks Kissinger, Radboud University Nijmegen
Alexander Kurz, University of Leicester and Chapman University
Jean-Simon Lemay, University of Oxford
Martha Lewis, University of Amsterdam
Dan Marsden, University of Oxford
Samuel Mimram, École Polytechnique
Michael Moortgat, Utrecht University
Nina Otter, University of California, Los Angeles
Simona Paoli, University of Leicester
Robin Piedeleu, University College London
David Reutter, University of Oxford
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London (chair)
Christine Tasson, Paris Diderot University
Jamie Vicary, University of Birmingham and University of Oxford
Tamara von Glehn, University of Cambridge
Quanlong Wang, University of Oxford
Gijs Wijnholds, Queen Mary University of London
Philipp Zahn, University of St. Gallen
Fabio Zanasi, University College London

Steering committee

The symposium is managed by the following people. If you have a general question about SYCO, or if you want to propose to host a future version, please get in touch with a member of the steering committee.

Ross Duncan, University of Strathclyde
Chris Heunen, University of Edinburgh
Dominic Horsman, University of Grenoble
Aleks Kissinger, Radboud University Nijmegen
Samuel Mimram, École Polytechnique
Simona Paoli, University of Leicester
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary
Pawel Sobocinski, University of Southampton
Jamie Vicary, University of Birmingham and University of Oxford