In recent years there has been much progress concerning the geometry of moduli spaces of flat connections, Higgs bundles, and their relation to integrable systems such as Hitchin systems and Painleve equations. For example, isomonodromic deformations of singular flat connections on Riemann surfaces induce nonlinear differential equations of Painleve type including classical Painleve equations. The family of moduli spaces of singular connections gives the phase space of such a differential equation. This is related to the fact that the phase spaces of Hitchin integrable systems are given by moduli spaces of Higgs bundles.

The main purpose of this workshop is to discuss recent progress related to the geometry of moduli space of flat connections, Higgs bundles, and their relations with integrable systems. Every invited speaker will give two fifty minute lectures.