This conference aims to bring together leading experts in the vital area of automorphic forms and their L-functions, which enjoyed a lot of progress in the last couple of years. A paradigmatic example for this development - to which the word "new directions" in the meeting's title alludes - is the Gan-Gross-Prasad conjecture (local and global). Just within the last couple of years a lot of exciting results on its local version have been estabilshed in breakthrough work; whereas its global variant has been subject to a series of interesting refinements, such as of Ichino-Ikeda, Neil Harris and most recently Liu. Being (partly) financed by H. Grobner's 2016 START-prize "Special L-values and p-adic L-functions", this conference seeks to shed some new light on the topics raised in this triangle of research. 

List of confirmed speakers:

• Ramla Abdellatif (Université de Picardie Jules Verne),
• Tobias Berger (University of Sheffield),
• Pierre-Henri Chaudouard (Université Paris 7 - Denis Diderot)
• Gaetan Chenevier (CNRS),
• Christophe Cornut (CNRS),
• Jean-François Dat (UPMC)
• Wee Teck Gan (National University of Singapore),
• Neven Grbac (University of Rijeka ),
• Marcela Hanzer (University of Zagreb),
• Eugen Hellmann (Universität Münster),
• Guy Henniart (Université Paris Sud),
• Atsushi Ichino (Kyoto University),
• Fabian Januszewski (KIT),
• Erez Lapid (Weizmann Institute),
• Colette Moeglin (CNRS),
• Gil Moss (Univeristy of Utah),
• Yianis Sakellaridis (Rutgers),
• Makarand Sarnobat (IISER Pune)
• Gordan Savin (University of Utah),
• Eitan Sayag (Ben Gurion University),
• Vincent Secherre (Université de Versailles),
• Marko Tadic (University of Zagreb),
• Olivier Taïbi (Imperial College),
• Shusuke Yamana (Kyoto University).

Scientific committee: Ramla Abdellatif (Université de Picardie Jules Verne), Qëndrim Gashi (University of Prishtina), Harald Gröbner (University of Vienna), Alberto Mínguez (Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu - Rive Gauche), Colette Moeglin (CNRS).

Organizing committee: Kajtaz Bllaca (University of Prishtina), Qëndrim Gashi (University of Prishtina), Qamil Haxhibeqiri (University of Prishtina) and Muhib Lohaj (University of Prishtina).

Sponsors: Austrian Science Fund (START-Prize Y-966); Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Kosovo.