The extended BFN category and shifted Yangians
Aside from being a mouthful to say, truncated shifted Yangians and their related algebras are pretty difficult to work with when you try to use their usual presentation directly, a fact many of us have learned by experience. Luckily, these algebras also have a description in terms of the geometry of the affine Grassmannian, given by Braverman, Finkelberg and Nakajima, and this description suggests a larger category in which the truncated shifted Yangian is an endomorphism algebra. Luckily, we can ignore this geometry and give a direct description of this category in terms of diagrams drawn on a cylinder, in the style of Khovanov and Lauda. This perspective makes it much easier to understand the representation theory of these algebras, and particular, allows us to relate them to KLR algebras, and thus to canonical bases and crystals.