Abstracts John T. Baldwin University of Illinois at Chicago Quasimiminimality, Categoricity, and Excellence in $L_{\omega_1,\omega}$ We describe the connections between Zilber's work on categoricity in quasiminimal excellent classes, the general theory of excellence in $L_{\omega_1,\omega}$, and Shelah's generalization of Morley's theorem to this context. If time permits we will discuss Zilber's analytic model for the green field and connections to quantum tori. Martin Bays Oxford Model theory of exponential maps of commutative algebraic groups I will discuss the elementary and non-elementary classification theory of universal group covers of commutative algebraic groups, after Zilber and Gavrilovich. I will explain how the model theory is tightly connected to some well-studied and not-so-well-studied issues of an arithmetic nature. This talk will in part report on recent joint work with Anand Pillay. Oleg Belegradek Bilgi University How it started: early works of Zilber I will speak on the development of ideas of geomeric stability theory in Boris' works of the seventies. David Evans Covers Questions about finite covers, particularly those with finite relative automorphism group, were studied 10 to 15 years ago. A more recent preprint of Hrushovski (`Groupoids, Imaginaries and Internal Covers') provides a new way of looking at some of these questions. The aim of this talk is to review some of the results in Hrushovski's preprint and relate some of the older results to them. Piotr Kowalski Wroclaw Independence in positive characteristic Several years ago Boris Zilber suggested to me to work on a positive characteristic version of Ax's theorem. In my talk I will discuss what happened next. Dugald Macpherson Leeds Groups in stable and simple theories This will be an introductory talk around stable group theory and related topics (such as groups in simple and o-minimal theories). I will discuss chain conditions in stable groups, groups of finite Morley rank (some of the earlier results), stabilisers in stable and simple theories, and 1- based groups. Bruno Poizat Lyon One, two, three! Once I wrote that the main argument in a famous paper published by Cherlin in 1979, "Groups of small Morley rank", is that the only positive integers smaller than three are one and two. I will produce a stronger illustration of this principle: with some supplementary work, the results of Cherlin can be obtained using the Cantor rank, which fails to have the paradisiac properties of the Morley rank. This shows that the meagre things that we know on the Zil'ber and Cherlin conjecture, more than thirty years after its formulation, does not depend on the deep properties of the groups of finite Morley rank. Vladimir Tolstykh (Yeditepe University, Istanbul) On the automorphism groups of groups F/R’ Let F be an infinitely generated free group and R a fully invariant subgroup of F such that (a) R is contained in the commutator subgroup F' of F; (b) the quotient group F/R is residually torsion-free nilpotent. Then the automorphism group Aut(F/R') of the group F/R' is complete. In particular, the automorphism group of any infinitely generated free solvable group of derived length at least two is complete. This extends a similar result by Dyer and Formanek (1977) on finitely generated groups F_n/R’ where F_n is a free group of finite rank n at least two and R a characteristic subgroup of F_n. Hrushovski: The notion of a stabilizer Abstract: In the late 1970's, Zilber's notion of a stabilizer, as it appeared for instance in his indecomposability theorem, had a profound effect on the young subject of groups of finite Morley rank. I will trace the development of this notion in stable group theory, simplicity, and a recent application to combinatorics. Bouscaren: Model Theoretic Ranks and divisible groups in separably closed fields (joint with F.Benoist and A.Pillay). Cherlin: Torsion in Connected Groups of Finite Morley rank. (long abstract attached) Hasson: Symmetric Indivisibility of model theoretic structures. Abstract: In induced Ramsey theory a countable relational structure M is said to be indivisible if for any colouring of M in two colours there exists a monochromatic substructure N which is isomorphic to M. The structure M is said to be symmetrically indivisible if, in addition, one can require that any isomorphism of the monochromatic structure N can be extended to an automorphism of M. In the talk we will show that Rado's random graph is symmetrically indivisible (a result of Kojman and Geschke) and extend their proof to other structures such as dense linear orders, the random n-hyper graph and the colourful graph). We will introduce a seemingly more powerful new proof of these facts, and use it to prove the symmetric indivisibility of the triangle free random graph, and other structures. We will also present some simple model theoretic necessary conditions for a structure to be (symmetrically) indivisible, and conclude with a couple of intriguing open questions. This is a joint work with M. Kojman and A. Onshuus.