Announcement: Conference and School on the First Billion Years of the Universe at IIT Indore

[Eli]

We are happy to announce a five-day-long conference and a five-day-long school titled "Observing the First Billion Years of the Universe using Next Generation Telescopes" at IIT Indore, India during 20-24 January 2020 (conference) and 27-31 January 2020 (school).

Summary:

The conference will focus on the progress and present status of multi-wavelength observations, modelling, and statistical inference tools of the CD-EoR and post-EoR epoch. The school will consist of a series of lectures, hands-on demonstrations, and discussions by experts on different methods of analytical modelling, simulations, observations, data reduction, and statistical inference for multi-wavelength observations of this early phase of our Universe. This will be part of the ongoing effort of the SKA-India consortium, which has been conducting such schools annually since 2016. The registration for both the conference and the school are open now.

Important dates:
Registration and abstract submission starts: 01 September 2019
Registration and abstract submission ends: 06 October 2019
Conference: 20-24 January 2020
School: 27-31 January 2020

Venue:
IIT Indore, India

Issues in focus:
Reionization of hydrogen and helium
First sources of light
Updates on 21-cm experiments
Updates on X-ray, UV, IR experiments
Obstacles in the observations
Modelling and simulations of the first billion years
Cosmology via intensity mapping of 21-cm and signals in other wavelengths
Cross-correlation and other synergy studies between observations in 21-cm and other wavelengths
Constraints on the dark matter/dark energy
Statistical estimators of the expected signals and statistical inference tools

Scientific Organizing Committee:
Sangeeta Malhotra (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA)
Cathryn Trott (Curtin University, ICRAR, Australia)
Mario Santos (University of Western Cape, South Africa)
Steven Furlanetto (University of California-Los Angeles, USA)
James Aguirre (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Susumu Inoue (RIKEN, iTHEMS, Japan)
Tzu-Ching Chang (JPL, California Institute of Technology, USA)
Garrelt Mellema (Stockholm University, Sweden)
Erik Zackrisson (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Tirthankar Roy Choudhury (NCRA-TIFR, India)
Suman Majumdar (IIT Indore, India)
Abhirup Datta (IIT Indore, India)

For details, please check the conference website: http://www.iiti.ac.in/people/~firstbillion/