20 July 2017:

1) The paper Blake and I wrote on [A compositional framework for reaction networks](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02051) has been accepted by _Reviews in Mathematical Physics_. The best part: it seems no corrections were demanded!

2) More news from Daniel, who is at the big annual category theory conference:

> I ran into Rick Blute who was my masters adviser and the editor of TAC that I sent my Spans of Cospans paper to. He told me he recently sent an email to the referee reminding them to get me a report. We'll see how that goes.

> I gave my talk on Lack and Rosicky's Notions of Lawvere Theories paper today. I got great feedback from Emily Riehl, so that was nice. I presented believing the entire time that this white haired and white bearded man sitting front and center was Bill Lawvere (he was supposed to be here) but it turned out to be Michael Barr. Oddly, I was not the only one of the Kan seminar group to make this mistake.

> Us Kan folk, along with some alumni from the first instance of the online seminar went out to dinner and it turns out Christina Vasilakopoulou was one of these alumni, so we got to chat a bit.

3) James Haydon is applying decorated cospans to computer science:

> What I've done is set up a framework for composing coroutines (= asynchronous cooperating processes) using a category of decorated cospans. Furthermore, I've implemented the whole thing in code: actual composition of concurrent processes via pushouts!

> As an underlying category I take typed channel contexts; this represents a support for a pi-calculus process: channel names and types which it may read and write from. The morphisms map names while respecting the typing structure.

> For such a context \$$X\$$, I define a restricted pi-calculus \$$\Pi(X)\$$, which is the set of well typed pi-calculi processes that may only read and write to the channel names specified in \$$X\$$.

> This defines a monoidal functor

> $\Pi : (\mathrm{TyCh}, +) \to (\mathrm{Set}, \times)$

> with the required properties to form a category of decorated cospans. I have implemented all this in the Idris programming language, the source code is here:

> https://github.com/jameshaydon/cospanProc

> I've experimented with several examples and I think this provides a nice framework for organising code, and composing processes in a safe way. While you compose the processes, you simultaneously compute, via the pushout, the communication interface the resulting process will expose.