The n-Category Café

Thanks for your reply, thoughtful, helpful and useful as always :-)

My question #1 was meant to refer (sorry I was not adequately specific or clear on this) to
a specific part of the linked Leicester web page,
where we find the following (quoted between the lines below):

——

Research Areas and Supervision
We [Leicester] welcome applications from those looking to undertake doctoral research in any aspect of informatics or computer science compatible with the research interests of our academic staff including:

Algorithms: Complexity and Engineering (ACE)
Foundations of Computing (FoCo)
Interaction Design and Evaluation of Socio-technical Systems (IDEAS)
Knowledge Discovery and Machine Learning (KDML)
Software Modelling and Evolution (SOME)
Validation and Verification (VALVE)

Strategic directions that are of particular interest are Artificial Intelligence, Computational Modelling, Data Science, and Digitalisation.

——-

In Leicester’s original document each topic listed above is linked to an explanation.

Jumping to a more general topic,
I know, understand, and appreciate how seemingly pure topics in math can ultimately be of the highest use and value to society.
In particular, I love, admire, and appreciate the work that you and, say, Simona Paoli, have done on the development and applications of category theory.
(I just bought her book and it looks wonderful. Thank you, Simona!
Her work is not yet applied, AFAIK, but it surely will ultimately be of the utmost value.
And of course your work, with various students and colleagues, on networks, cospans and so on, is already extraordinarily helpful.)

But (pardon me :-) I just wonder if mathematicians might be able to apply
all the wonderful, beautiful, powerful (and I am NOT being sarcastic) ideas, concepts, and methods that they have developed
to the practical, down-to-earth topics listed in the Leicester announcement quoted above.
(Of course many are, but I am thinking of what led to the Leicester conflict here.)
Just as our 18C ancestors applied their development of calculus to real-world problems.
Indeed, perhaps pointedly, it was largely motivated by those problems.

What I am trying to do is suggest a mutually acceptable compromise between the goals of the Leicester administration and those of its math faculty.
Bridging an apparent gap between pure mathematics and informatics, computer science and Data Science.

One may argue that I should have brought this up in your January 2021 post cited above,
Nishan Canagarajah Screws Up,
and they would probably be right.
That post, and the related discussion on the cat list, really motivated these remarks.
But the relation of Otter’s project and Leicester’s desiderata prompted me to raise the issue here.

Keith wrote:

What I am trying to do is suggest a mutually acceptable compromise between the goals of the Leicester administration and those of its math faculty.

So is the idea that the pure math faculty would say “if you don’t lay us off, we’ll work on something more like what you want?”

I think it would be hard for a faculty member to make a convincing case that they will change their research topic. I think the administration thinks it’s easier to just lay off faculty now to save money — and then perhaps later, when they’re not so broke, hire new faculty who are working on subjects the administration likes.

They administration has announced their intention to lay off about 145 faculty. They have given some faculty the chance to apply for new jobs that only involve teaching, not research.

By the way, I’d rather be talking about this on the post about Leicester. This post here was the announcement of a data visualization boot camp run by DeMoS.

I too assumed it was intended to be taken seriously, hence my question.

The DeMoS institute is just getting started. This “boot camp” is their first project, so it’s the main way so far to see what they’ll do. The idea of paying students is smart, since it may encourage some candidates to apply who otherwise would be too busy working at low-wage summer jobs — as students often do, except the lucky ones.

They will run a workshop in October, which I will be involved in, so after that I’ll know more.