------------------- Title: Symplectic birational geometry Speaker: Yongbin Ruan Abstract: In the early day of Gromov-Witten theory, one of the intended applications was to generalize some elements of Mori's birational geometry program to symplectic geometry. One naturally wondered if there is a symplectic birational geometry generalizing the algebraic one. There was little progress in the last ten years. Recently, Tian-Jun Li and the author have put forth a proposal. In the talk, I will describe the main elements of the proposal such as symplectic birational equivalence, birational invariance of a uniruled manifold, dichotomy of uniruled submanifold and minimal model. This subject is very much in its infancy and a good playground for students and postdocs.