Thank you for your kind remarks! As you mentioned, a better name might have been "languages for calculation". In French these subjects are all "calcul". Personally, I would skip the first few and listen to the guest speakers, who have spent a lot more time thinking about these topics. You might also enjoy the lectures from OPLSS, where I learned about many of these ideas. [1]

  These three areas are also all linked to historical and current AI research.

Indeed, they all seem to have some fascinating connections to symbolic and connectionist learning. I think the symbolists were originally on the right track, but they were too preoccupied with expert systems when they should have been working at a much lower level of representation. One way to view the current wave of deep learning is as a form of symbolic differentiation with a special order of evaluation corresponding to reverse-mode AD.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDe6N9R7U-RYWA57wzJQ2SQ