Since the work of Oystein Ore in the 30's one can construct a group of fractions from a nice category. Very interesting groups arise in this way such as Richard Thompson's groups. Recently Vaughan Jones discovered that any functor starting from such a category provides an action of the associated group of fractions. In particular one can explicitly construct unitary representations or actions on various operator algebras. I will present the general machinery of Jones and describe applications to group theory and, if time permits, to quantum field theory. Those are a joint works with Jones and Stottmeister.