Dear all, As part of a new growing community in Applied Category Theory, now with a dedicated journal Compositionality, a traveling workshop series SYCO, a forthcoming CUP book series Reasoning with Categories, and several one-off events including at NIST, we launch an annual conference+school series named Applied Category Theory, the coming one being at Oxford, July 15-19 for the conference, and July 22-26 for the school. The dates are chosen such that CT 2019 (Edinburgh) and the ACT 2019 conference (Oxford) will be back-to-back, for those wishing to participate in both. There already was a successful invitation-only pilot last year at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden: https://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2018/969/info.php3?wsid=969&venue=Oort <https://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2018/969/info.php3?wsid=969&venue=Oort> also in the format of school+workshop. For the conference, for those who are familiar with the successful QPL conference series, we will follow a very similar format for the ACT conference. This means that we will accept both new papers which then will be published in a proceedings volume (most likely a Compositionality special Proceedings issue), as well as shorter abstracts of papers published elsewhere. There will be a thorough selection process, as typical in computer science conferences. The idea is that all the best work in applied category theory will be presented at the conference, and that acceptance is something that means something, just like in CS conferences. This is particularly important for young people as it will help them with their careers. Expect a call for submissions soon, and start preparing your papers now! The school was unique in that small groups of students worked closely with an experienced researcher (these were John Baez, Aleks Kissinger, Martha Lewis and Pawel Sobociński), and each group ended up producing a paper. We will continue with this format or a closely related one, with Jules Hedges and Daniel Cicala as organisers this year. As there were 80 applications last year for 16 slots, we may want to try to find a way to involve more students. We are fortunate to have a number of private sector companies closely associated in some way or another, who will also participate, with Cambridge Quantum Computing Inc. and StateBox having already made major financial/logistic contributions. On behalf of the ACT Steering Committee, John Baez, Bob Coecke, David Spivak, Christina Vasilakopoulou [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]