The aim of this Workshop is to bring to together researchers in group actions to shed light on new and old conjectures about symmetries of spaces through a multi-faceted approach. The program will include a limited number of survey and research talks to allow time for informal discussions and collaborations.

The classical subject of group actions concerns transformation groups of finite dimensional topological spaces, CW complexes or manifolds. The foundational work of P.A. Smith, Borel and Quillen on p-group or torus actions relates the ordinary or equivariant cohomology of a G-space to that of its fixed point set.

More recently there have been advances in understanding the notion of homotopy group actions. One formulation of this derived concept of symmetry is to consider the homotopy classes of maps between classifying spaces BG --> BAut(X), where Aut(X) is the group of self-homotopy equivalences of a space. The study of BAut(X) is a topic of fundamental importance in topology, and there are many attractive open questions for future research.

We hope that the meeting will reflect the theme of symmetry in a wide variety of settings, including symplectic geometry and topology, toric manifolds, representation varieties, algebraic stacks, and surgery theory.