The Third International Congress on Tools for Teaching Logic (TICTLL) will be held in Sevilla, Spain, from 1-4 June 2011. We expect to issue the first call for papers in June 2010.
	Here's the website of Advances in Modal Logic (AiML), which is being held in Moscow from the 24-27 August 2010.
	Here are the details of the Workshop on Theories of Information Dynamics and Interaction and their Application to Dialogue a workshop held from 16-20 August 2010 as part of the (second!) Copenhagen ESSLLI.
	Information about NASSLLI is now online, which is being held in Bloomington, Indiana from 20-26 June 2010. Carlos Areces and I will be teaching a rather novel introductory logic course there, and testing some new course material. Watch this space...
	Here's a streaming video presentation of Torben Brauner's Doktoral defense at the University of Roskilde, Denmark, in April 2009. It's essentially a lengthy presentation and discussion of hybrid logic, with input from Torben, Melvin Fitting, Stig Andur Pedersen, Peter Ohrstrom, and me.
	Although it's only one year old, two papers published by the Review of Symbolic Logic (RSL) have just been selected by the 2008 Philosophers' Annual for its list of the the ten best philosophy papers published during year.

Patrick Blackburn INRIA Address: INRIA Nancy Grand-Est Equipe TALARIS, Batiment B 615, rue du Jardin Botanique 54602 Villers lès Nancy Cedex, France Tel: +33 (0)3 83 59 30 52 Fax: +33 (0)3 83 41 30 79 e-mail: patrick.blackburn@loria.fr Office: B230

I am head of an INRIA team called TALARIS, which specialises in semantically-oriented tasks in computational linguistics, with particular emphasis on semantic tasks requiring inference. TALARIS stands for Traitement Automatique des Langues: Représentation, Inférence et Sémantique (Traitement Automatique des Langues, or TAL for short, is the French term for computational linguistics). Tasks that TALARIS team members are particularly interested in include: Semantics of Natural Language; Logics for Natural Language and Knowledge Representation; Discourse, Dialog, and Pragmatics; and Multilinguality for Multimedia.

My own research centers on logic and its applications in cognitive science, computer science, and philosophy. I am particularly interested in applications that have something to do with natural language (that is, ordinary human languages, such as English, French, Maori, Dutch, German, and Chinese). It is an exciting time to be working in this area. Advances in mathematical logic, computational logic, and philosophical logic, are making deeper contact with natural language syntax and semantics. Corpus-based methods are bringing a new sense of realism to linguistics, and profoundly changing its methodological orientation. All in all, the interdisciplinary exploration of meaning in natural language seems poised to yield important new insights.

There are two topics which particularly interest me at the moment. On the logical side, I am particularly interested in the modal/hybrid/description family of logics. On the natural language side, I am particularly interested in semantics and pragmatics for natural language; the Gricean perspective (broadly construed) is my main interest here. I'm also interested in logical approaches to natural language syntax (for example: model-theoretic syntax, unification-based syntax, and categorial grammar). But the interplay of semantics, pragmatics, and philosophical logic is steadily becoming my dominant research interest, so I don't know when (if ever) I'll get back into these areas.

You can still see the moon
Though it's the middle of the morning.
You can smell the clay.
Like I said, you can count yourself lucky ---
Not many people know this way.
  The Muttonbirds.

Ik behoor niet tot der minderheid die zegt dat het leven geen zin heeft, als dat al een minderheid is. Ik behoor tot de minderheid die zegt dat het leven godzijdank geen zin heeft.   Jaap van Heerden.

Doe maar gewoon, en dat is al gek genoeg.   Anon.

Nothing you write is ever as bad as you fear or as good as you hope.   Bertrand Russell.

Good prose is like a window pane   George Orwell.

My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one still clings. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!   James Joyce.

``I'm a metalogician'', Bron said. ``I define and redefine the relation between P and Not-P five hours a day, four days a week.''   From Trouble on Triton, by Samuel Delany, 1976.

And, hanging over it all, the brooding specter of Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, the Vienna Circle of Philosophy and the rise of symbolic logic. A muddy world, in which he did not care to involve himself.   From Galactic Pot-Healer, by Philip K. Dick, 1969.

It was the same with Geometry. I could never understand this proving business. Why not measure a thing and see if it fits, and if it fits then obviously it's the same. If it doesn't fit then it's not the same. Why this proving things? Congruent triangles and so on - and cyclic quadrilaterals? Measure them and then you'll see.   From Seventeen Come Sunday, by James Garford, 1961.

Play that funky music white boy
Play that funky music right
Play that funky music white boy
Lay down the boogie
and play that funky music till you die
  Wild Cherry.