Khovanov and Seidel introduced in the early 2000's an action of the braid group by autoequi-valences on the homotopy category of projective modules over the zig-zag algebra. This categorical action descends to the Burau representation, one of the most famous braid representations, but unlike the classical story, the lifting is faithful. It is interesting to notice that simultaneously, the Burau representation was also extended into a faithful finite-dimensional linear representation by Lawrence, Krammer and Bigelow, proving the linearity of the braid group.
I will review the basic constructions, both at the level of vector representations and at the ca-tegorical level. We will discuss possible extensions of these from classical braids (type A) to larger Artin-Tits groups, spherical or not, and try to relate Khovanov-Seidel's construction to Soergel bimodules and categorified quantum groups. I will also try to emphasize several metric aspects that appear in an elegant way from the categorical setting, with an emphasis on Bridgeland's stability conditions. Along the way, I would like to list several open questions and problems that I care about, hoping that someone in the audience will come up with a good idea.[-]

Given a finite simple graph X, the right-angled Artin group associated to X is defined by the following very simple presentation: it has one generator per vertex of X, and the only relations consist in imposing that two generators corresponding to adjacent vertices commute. We investigate right-angled Artin groups from the point of view of measured group theory. Our main theorem is that two right-angled Artin groups with finite outer automorphism groups are measure equivalent if and only if they are isomorphic. On the other hand, right-angled Artin groups are never superrigid from this point of view: given any right-angled Artin group G, I will also describe two ways of producing groups that are measure equivalent to G but not commensurable to G.This is joint work with Jingyin Huang.[-]

I will report on progress with Daniel Allcock on the ”Monstrous Proposal”, namely the conjecture: Complex hyperbolic 13-space, modulo a particular discrete group, and with orbifold structure changed in a simple way, has fundamental group equal to (MxM)(semidirect)2, where M is the Monster finite simple group. Our progress is a proof that this orbifold fundamental group has generators that satisfy defining relations for (MxM)(semidirect) 2. It follows that either the monstrous proposal is true, or else the orbifold fundamental group collapses to Z/2. The generators and relations are extremely natural from the complex hyperbolic perspective, keeping hopes high for the conjecture. [-]

We prove that generic elements of braid groups are pseudo-Anosov, in the following sense: in the Cayley graph of the braid group with $n\geq 3$ strands, with respect to Garside's generating set, we prove that the proportion of pseudo-Anosov braids in the ball of radius $l$ tends to $1$ exponentially quickly as $l$ tends to infinity. Moreover, with a similar notion of genericity, we prove that for generic pairs of elements of the braid group, the conjugacy search problem can be solved in quadratic time. The idea behind both results is that generic braids can be conjugated ''easily'' into a rigid braid.
braid groups - Garside groups - Nielsen-Thurston classification - pseudo-Anosov - conjugacy problem[-]

Parabolic subgroups are the fundamental building blocks of Artin groups. These subgroups are isomorphic copies of smaller Artin groups nested inside a given Artin group. In this talk, I will discuss questions surrounding how parabolic subgroups sit inside Artin groups and how they interact with each other. I will show that, in an FC type Artin group, the intersection of two finite type parabolic subgroups is a parabolic subgroup. I will also discuss how parabolic subgroups might be used to construct a simplicial complex for Artin groups similar to the curve complex for mapping class groups. This talk will focus on using geometric techniques to generalize results known for finite type Artin groups to Artin groups of FC type.[-]