Hi all, From 28 to 31 October 2013, the first "Congrès de Mathématiques Nord-Pas de Calais / Belgique" will take place in Valenciennes (France, the first two days) and Mons (Belgium, the last two days). Several mathematical disciplines are covered, with invited speakers before noon, and parallel thematic sessions in the afternoon. The website of the conference is here: https://math.umons.ac.be/npcbe13/ On Wednesday 30 October, an afternoon session is dedicated to the theory and applications of categories. This will take place at the maths department of the Université de Mons (easy to reach by train from either Lille or Brussels). The programme is the following: 14h00 Steve Lack - The Catalan simplicial set 14h45 Tim Van der Linden - What is a tensor product internally? 15h30 coffee 16h00 Joost Vercruysse - Quasi-Frobenius functors 16h45 Tom Leinster - The eventual image 17h30 end Abstracts for these talks can be found at: https://math.umons.ac.be/npcbe13/program.html#categ The conference website says that registration is closed, but you can contact the organisers if you wish to attend (part of) the conference: https://math.umons.ac.be/npcbe13/registration.html Participation is free---and I see no reason why those interested to participate in the category session, would be refused to do so! Best wishes, Isar Stubbe. [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]