This conference is mostly about quantum gravity and its intrinsic nonlocal feature, but also about general gravitational theories beyond Eisntein’s gravity, black holes, cosmology, and observational tests.

It is well known that any fundamental theory is nonlocal at the quantum level, namely the quantum effective action is a “very nonlocal” functional. Moreover, quantum mechanics itself is intrinsically nonlocal. Furthermore, when we try to construct a consistent theory for quantum gravity non locality turns out to be unavoidable. Indeed, in our days we have several consistent proposals for quantum gravity: String Theory, Loop Quantum Gravity, Nonlocal Quantum Gravity, Asymptotically Safe Quantum Gravity, etc., and all of them are nonlocal. In this conference we will try to make the point of the current understanding of several approaches to quantum gravity with particular attention to the locality paradigm at short distance. In particular we will try to point out issues and ways to overcome them.

However, besides the fundamental theoretical problems, other topics of the conference are about the spacetime singularitys’ issue, black holes at the classical and quantum level, the information loss problem, and the cosmological implications at short and large distance of a large class of local and nonlocal gravitational theories.

The key-topics of the conference are:
– Nonlocal Quantum Gravity
– Super-renormalizable Quantum Gravity Theories
– String Theory
– Loop Quantum Gravity
– Theories Beyond Einstein Gravity
– Spacetime Singularities
– Classical and Quantum Black Holes
– Cosmology
– Gravitational Waves
– Observational Tests

Invited Speakers:
Rong-Gen Cai (Institute of Theoretical Physics/CAS, China)*
Xavier Calmet (Sussex University, UK)*
John Donoghue (Massachusetts Amherst, US)*
Yungui Gong (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China)
Alexy Koshelev (Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal)
Yongge Ma (Beijing Normal University, China)
Anupam Mazumdar (University of Groningen)
Yun-Soo Myung (Inje University, South Korea)
Ilya Shapiro (Juiz de Fora University, Brazil)
Terry Tomboulis (University of California Los Angeles, US)
Richard Woodard (University of Florida Gainesville, US)
Nico Yunes (Montana State University, US)
… and others
* To be confirmed

Scientific Organizing Committee:
Cosimo Bambi (Fudan University, China; Chair)
Rong-Gen Cai (Institute of Theoretical Physics/CAS, China)
Gianluca Calcagni (IEM-CSIC Madrid, Spain)
Valeri Frolov (University of Alberta, Canada)
Miao Li (Sun Yat-sen University, China)
Yongge Ma (Beijing Normal University, China)
Anzhong Wang (Zhejiang University of Technology, China)
Haitang Yang (Sichuan University, China)
Shuang-Nan Zhang (Institute of High Energy Physics/CAS, China)

Local Organizing Committee:
Cosimo Bambi (Fudan University, China)
Gianluca Calcagni (IEM-CSIC Madrid, Spain)
Leonardo Modesto (SUSTech, China; Chair)
Guanhao Xie (SUSTech, China)