[Alta-Logic] reminder: peripatetic seminar today

Florian Schwarz florian.schwarz at ucalgary.ca
Fri Nov 15 11:28:41 MST 2024


Dear all,

This is a friendly reminder that today, November 15th Nolan Peter Shaw 
will speak in the peripatetic seminar. It will take place at 1pm in ICT 616.

*Title:* All Concepts are Kan Extensions... and Kan Extensions are 
Concepts: A Categorical Theory of Vector Symbolic Architectures

*Abstract: *It is widely understood by category theorists that Kan 
extensions subsume all other notions in category theory (limits, ends, 
initial objects, adjoints, etc.). In this talk, I introduce vector 
symbolic architectures (VSAs)---a distributed model of data storage and 
manipulation that have gained popularity alongside the neuromorphic 
hardware upon which engineers hope to implement VSAs. Broadly, VSAs 
populate a vector space with a collection of "primitive" vectors, then 
use two operations, 'binding' and 'bundling', to create new vectors (ex. 
"red" and "car" bind as "red car"). Despite their many implementations, 
VSAs have little unifying theory. I discuss my recent work generalising 
and unifying VSAs. I focus on extending from vectors to co-presheaves 
and demonstrating that bind and bundle arise as right Kan extensions of 
the external tensor product and direct sum.

Website: https://logic.ucalgary.ca

Hope to see you there!

Best regards,

Florian Schwarz
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