Title:  Contact structures, Heegaard Floer homology and triangulated categories.

Abstract:  The goal of this talk is to associate a category $\mathcal{C}(\Sigma)$
to a surface $\Sigma$, called the {\em contact category}
and constructed from contact structures on $\Sigma\times[0,1]$.
The category $\mathcal{C}(\Sigma)$ satisfies many of the axioms of a
triangulated category, and, in particular,has distinguished triangles
which we call the {\em bypass exact triangles}.
We then describe an ``exact'' functor from $\mathcal{C}(\Sigma)$ to the
category of vector spaces, via Heegaard/sutured Floer homology.