Conferences

We are pleased to announce “GWfreeride: Carving the AI Gradient in Gravitational-Wave Astronomy,” a focused workshop taking place January 26-30, 2026, in Sexten, Italy, nestled in the scenic Dolomites region.

sites.google.com/unimib.it/gwfreeride

The workshop aims to bring together leading researchers in AI and gravitational waves to address pressing data challenges in the field. Key topics include single-event detection and parameter estimation, population inference, and the global fit. The meeting will be held at Haus Sexten, right next to the ski slopes, and the conference program will have appropriate breaks for snow activities. More details on logistics are available here: sites.google.com/unimib.it/gwfreeride/logistics

To participate, please apply at sites.google.com/unimib.it/gwfreeride/registration We encourage early applications to facilitate hotel reservations, with a final deadline of September 15, 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent on a rolling basis. We look forward to welcoming you to Sexten!

Stephen Green, Davide Gerosa, Max Dax, Natalia Korsakova

This week we’re all at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) in beautiful L’Aquila for the second edition of our joint workshop with the local GW group. Thanks for having us!

davidegerosa.com/thuram

(If you’re asking, the title of the workshop is a totally legit acronym that just happens to make up the name of FC Inter’s striker… So weird, it happened last year already, I really don’t know how.)

The Italian Society of General Relativity and Gravitation (SIGRAV) announces the 26th SIGRAV Conference, hosted by the University of Milano-Bicocca, to be held in Milan, Italy, from September 8-12, 2025.

https://sites.google.com/unimib.it/sigrav2025

The conference will cover various aspects of classical and quantum gravity, including tests of General Relativity, cosmology, gravity experiments, and gravitational waves from experimental, theoretical, and data-analysis perspectives.

Participation is open to SIGRAV members and non-members alike, both nationally and internationally. The program will feature a series of broad review talks on various aspects of gravitational physics, as well as contributed talks. The SIGRAV Amaldi medals, the SIGRAV prizes for young researchers, and the Giulio Rampa PhD thesis prize will be awarded during the conference. There will also be a public event dedicated to the 10-year anniversary of the first direct detection of gravitational waves, GW150914.

Abstracts for contributed talks should submitted by May 31, 2025. We aim to announce the full conference program by the end of June. Registrations will be accepted until July 15, 2025.

Milan is a beautiful, international city in the north of Italy and is served by three major airports with worldwide connections. The city is home to art, history, and great food; you can also explore nearby lakes or venture into the stunning Alps.

Together with Ilya Mandel, last week I organized a workshop titled “Gravitational-wave snowballs, populations, and models” in Sexten (Italy). Both the science and the scenery were just stellar! We had almost zero talks, and the entire conference was made of brainstorming sessions on three topics “Parametrization”, “Correlation,” and “Falsification.” There are already several emails circulating with several paper ideas coming out of it. Huge thanks to all those who led and participated in the discussions. Here is the conference website…

https://sites.google.com/unimib.it/gwsnowballs

… and here is us! We should definitely do it again. And remember: if you run population synthesis once, you shall be cursed forever.

The workshop “ Challenges and future perspectives in gravitational-wave astronomy: O4 and beyond ” will take place at the Lorentz Center (Leiden, Netherlands) from October 14th to October 18th, 2024.

Our goal is to foster an interdisciplinary discussion (with astrophysicists, data analysts, and machine learners) about how current and future observations of gravitational and electromagnetic waves can be used to shed light on the physics of compact-object formation and evolution.

We encourage interested participants to apply by July 21st, 2024 at:
https://www.lorentzcenter.nl/challenges-and-future-perspectives-in-gravitational-wave-astronomy-o4-and-beyond.html

Lorentz Workshops@Oort are scientific meetings for small groups of up to 55 participants, including both senior and junior scientists. We will dedicate a considerable amount of time to discussion sessions, thus stimulating an interactive atmosphere and encouraging collaboration between participants. The venue Lorentz Center@Oort is located at the Faculty of Science campus of Leiden University, the Netherlands. The Lorentz Center provides each participant with office space as well as various practical services such as arranging accommodations at the nearby hotel Van der Valk Hotel Leiden/Tulip Inn Leiden at a special rate, visa assistance, and bike rental. For more information see: www.lorentzcenter.nl

SOC : Fabio Antonini (chair), Maya Fishbach, Davide Gerosa, Laura Nuttall, Rosalba Perna, Simon Portegies Zwart.

This week we’re hosting researchers from the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) for a joint mini-conference / workshop / group meeting. More here:

davidegerosa.com/lautaro

This is part of a PRIN grant we have together (thanks Italy) with support from other grants as well (thanks Europe). The meeting has the best title ever (that was actually my idea…), the best logo ever (that was Giulia’s idea), and the best organization ever (huge thanks Costantino and Sara!).

Last week my group and I hosted the international workshop “Gravitational-wave populations: what’s next?.” It’s been a blast!

An unconventional conference, with almost zero talks and the vast majority of the time dedicated to discussions. I report the program here below, just to give you a feeling of what we discussed. The conference started with the question “ How many of you entered the field after GW150914? ” and virtually everyone raised their hand! It was so refreshing to see our field is alive.

We then went through population synthesis simulations, fancy statistical methods (I promise I’ll understand nonparametric methods one day!), intricacies of injections, catalogs, and overlap with our EM observer friends. We took a break on Wednesday for a social activity on Lake Como, with some folks diving into the lake and others hiking up to a small castle. All before dinner with a fascinating lake (and thunderstorm!) view.

Thanks all for joining and participating so actively. Huge thanks to Emanuele Berti and Salvo Vitale for co-organizing this with me, as well as the local GW group for assistance. Finally, congrats to Amanda Farah and Alex Criswell who won our SIGRAV early career prize.

And if you couldn’t make it for whatever reason no worries, we’ll do it again!

Conference program in a nutshell. These are our discussion sessions:

• Intro: the pieces of the population problem.
• What can/should astrophysicists and pop-synthers predict?
• What is the predictive power of pop-synth codes? Are we learning more than our assumptions?
• Hierarchical Bayesian fits: can we keep on doing this? Technical difficulties, scaling with the number of events, selection effects.
• Mind the outliers. Are they in or out of your fit? If you fit something well you also need to fit the rest.
• What is a catalog? Is p_astro the way to go? (Ir)relevance of subthreshold events.
• Mind the systematics. Are waveform/calibration impacting the population? And how about the assumed population?
• Beyond functional forms: “non-parametric” methods. What are they and what does it even mean.
• Beyond functional forms: “parametric but informed”. Machine learning emulators for pop-synth.
• More populations. LISA, X-ray binaries, Gaia, you name it.
• More than individual mergers. Stochastic backgrounds, foreground removal.
• Adding the redshift dimension: toward 3g! Use the population to do cosmology.
• What’s next? Summary and prospects.

The advanced class “Big data within science and industry” will take place on September 22nd at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Milan, Italy).

https://sites.google.com/unimib.it/bigdatamasterclass

Data are everywhere. Exploring scientific data is now at the heart of both scientific advances as well as industrial applications. This one-day master class provides a “learn by example” introduction to the fascinating world of big data, namely pieces of information that are so rich and structured that require targeted analysis techniques loosely referred to as machine learning or artificial intelligence.

The class is suitable for advanced MSc students, PhD students, and postdocs who wish to expand their proficiency in handling scientific data. The program features the participation of three world-leading experts from both academia and the private sector, as well as a hands-on experience for all participants.

For students enrolled in the Physics and Astronomy PhD program here at Milano-Bicocca, this 8-hour program will be recognized with 1 CFU. In any case, we are happy to provide attendance certificates.

Interested students should register by ** September 8th, 2023**. Participation is free of charge. We hope to accommodate everyone, but depending on the number of people registering, participants might need to be selected.

Davide Gerosa, Michele Fumagalli (Milano-Bicocca)

It is a pleasure to announce the workshop “Gravitational-wave populations: what’s next?” which we are currently organizing for next summer:

https://sites.google.com/unimib.it/gwpopnext

As the catalog of detected gravitational-wave events grows from O(10) to O(100) sources (but think millions in a few decades!), such increasingly detailed information is allowing us to dig deeper into the (astro)physics of compact objects. At the same time, new and more data require appropriately powerful statistical tools to be fully exploited. This highly interactive workshop (fewer talks, more working together!) will be the opportunity to share recent progress, identify what new steps are now needed, and hopefully set the stage for substantial progress in the field.

The workshop will take place on July 10-14, 2023 at the University of Milano-Bicocca, which is located near the city center of Milan, Italy. Milan is a beautiful, international city in the north of Italy and is served by three major airports with worldwide connections. The city is home to art, history, and great food; nearby excursions will take you to the Italian lakes and the stunning Alps.

While we are unable to provide travel support, the workshop will have no registration fee. The workshop will be in person without remote options.

Interested participants should register on the conference website by March 1st, 2023. Depending on the number of people registering, participants might need to be selected. We will be in touch soon after the registration deadline, so please do not make travel plans until you hear back from us. When registering please indicate which of the discussion session(s) you would like to contribute to. Early career scientists will have the opportunity to give flash talks highlighting their science.

Davide Gerosa (Milano-Bicocca), Emanuele Berti (Johns Hopkins), Salvatore Vitale (MIT)

We’re at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) today, for a brainstorming workshop we organized together with the gravity groups at JHU and Penn State. A ton of interesting people, cool science, fun numerics, big black holes, future detectors, and many new exciting projects we all want to start. The idea is to get “a little help from my (gravity) friends”. Have a look at what we’re up to: davidegerosa.com/with-a-little-help-from-my-friends

The next few years are expected to be a golden age for pulsar timing array (PTA) science. The recent tentative claim of a detection of an astrophysical signal in the NANOGrav 12.5-year data set is expected to be confirmed, thereby opening a new observational window on supermassive black holes. In order to better follow these developments, Chris Moore and I will run a spring journal club in which we aim to review some key papers in the field. More info: [davidegerosa.com/ptaprimer/][/ptaprimer].

This is a quick update some of our group activities… In the past few months we’ve been busy learning about the formation of stellar-mass black-hole binaries in the disks of active galactic nuclei. We organized a journal club and studied one paper each week on this “new” formation channel for LIGO sources. We discussed a ton of topics, going from disk accretion to migration traps, LIGO rates, AGN variability, GW counterparts, hierarchical mergers, all the way to EMRIs.

Here is a log of all the sessions: davidegerosa.com/bhbin-agndisks

Let me thanks all those who took part and presented papers including Daria, Matt (1), Chris, Eliot, Matt (2), Alberto, Evan, Riccardo, and Sean.

We are running a virtual workshop with my group (Bham) and Emanuele Berti’s group at Johns Hopkins University (Hop). It’s an attempt to feel a bit less lonely during the COVID pandemic. Hope this is the opportunity to start new projects! And we’re a funny crowd…

For more: davidegerosa.com/hopbham

This week I am organizing the GrEAT PhD winter school. GrEAT (which stands for Gravitational-wave Excellence through Alliance Training) is a synergy network between the UK and China. Our program features informal talks in the mornings and hands-on sessions in the afternoons, covering both theoretical and experimental gravitational-wave physics.

After the school in Birmingham, students will move on to various UK nodes to complete longer projects. In particular, Mingyue Zhou will stay here working with me.

Happy to report about the great success of our workshop ”Numerical Relativity beyond General Relativity”. This was organized by me, Helvi Witek, and Leo Stein at the Benasque physics center (Spain), in the beautiful region of the Pyrenees, on June 3-9, 2018. Was great to see world-leading experts from so many different fields (numerical relativity, gravitational-wave data analysis, self-force, theoretical physics, cosmology, etc) interacting and reporting their progress on innovative uses of computational techniques in gravitation. Here are the conference program and (some of) the talk’s slides.

I only wish the rain would have stopped for more than a few hours over the entire week. This is us with Einstein; we’re all beyond!

The 34th edition of the Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting, sponsored by the APS, was held at Caltech on March 16-17, 2018. This year’ edition was organized by me, Leo Stein and a few others, and was dedicated to Jim Isenberg who first started the Pacific Gravity meetings 34 years ago. We had a beautiful blend of people (including some very talented undergrads!) and topics (from numerical relativity, to quantum gravity, high-energy physics and gravitational-wave astronomy). I hope everybody had fun. I surely did!

Here is the conference program, and this below is the logo that I designed (It’s supposed to be Newton’s apple with some gravitational waves in Caltech’s orange color; I know, I’m a scientist, not an artist…). And congrats to Maria Okounkova who won the best student talk award of the APS.

Our workshop “The disc migration issue: from protoplanets to supermassive black holes” took place in May (2017) at the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy. Chaired by Cathie Clarke and co-organized by me, Giovanni Rosotti and a few other people, we tried to bring together people working on both planetary and black-hole physics, to understand what we have in common… Much like planets migrate in protoplanetary discs, supermassive black holes are also brought together by gas interactions. Same physics, different scales, right?

Here is the conference program (with some of the talk’s slides) and below is our beautiful logo (there are discs, waves, inspirals, and King’s College!). Thanks to the KAVLI and Templeton foundations for making this possible.