The purpose of the workshop is to address recent advances in our understanding of Quantum Gravity in various dimensions and, especially, the role played there by higher-spin, conformal, exceptional and other extended symmetries.

Over the recent years a great number of new approaches that shed new light on Quantum Gravity has been developed. Many of the advances are driven by different kinds of symmetries uncovered, postulated or underlying different paths to Quantum Gravity: supersymmetries, higher-spin symmetries, exceptional symmetries, W-symmetries, etc. Dualites, especially AdS/CFT correspondence, is an indispensable tool to infer the presence of some of the symmetries. This allows to carry over and apply many of the old and newly developed techniques like analytical bootstrap, Mellin amplitudes, holographic reconstruction.

The workshop will be organized in the form of research/review talks together with topical discussions. The main topics at the workshop will be higher-spin gravity, conformal bootstrap, holographic reconstruction, exceptional field theories and others.

The workshop will be hosted by Albert Einstein Institute (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), Potsdam and will be held December 3-7, 2018. We especially encourage young students/postdocs to apply.