RATIONALE

The observational evidence for a connection between Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and galaxy evolution appears now to be well established. Hence, it is clear that understanding galaxy evolution requires to account for the central supermassive black hole, its formation and its subsequent evolution. Significant progress have been made recently in obtaining a better census of AGN activity and in studying the connection between black hole growth and galaxy evolution. However, critical questions still remain unanswered: How and when are the first black holes seeds formed? What triggers AGN activity? Is the triggering mechanism a function of AGN luminosity and/or redshift? How complete is our AGN census? What kind of sources are we potentially missing? What is the observational evidence for AGN feedback? In what type of galaxies do we expect to detect it?

The combination of recent observations that are starting to come out from new facilities such as Herschel, NuSTAR, ALMA and others, as well as state of the art computational simulations, has allowed significant progress toward answering such questions. Therefore, we believe that it is very timely to have a conference to review these results and have a better feeling of where the future of the field in the next few years.

Topics to be covered include:

1. Formation of the first black hole seeds
2. Black hole/host galaxy scaling relations
3. AGN luminosity functions and demographics
4. Triggering of AGN at both low and high luminosities
5. AGN host galaxies
6. Computational simulations at both nuclear and cosmological scales
7. AGN feedback from observations and simulations