The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture predicts that the group of rational points on an elliptic curve E over Q has rank equal to the order of vanishing of the L-function of E. Generalisations of this conjecture to motives M were formulated by Belinson and Bloch-Kato. I will explain a proof of a version of the Bloch-Kato conjecture in p-adic coefficients, when M is attached to a p-ordinary Hilbert modular form of any weight and the order of vanishing is 1.

(joint work with Françoise Dal'Bo and Andrea Sambusetti)
Given a finitely generated group G acting properly on a metric space X,
the exponential growth rate of G with respect to X measures "how big"
the orbits of G are. If H is a subgroup of G, its exponential growth
rate is bounded above by the one of G. In this work we are interested in
the following question: what can we say if H and G have the same
exponential growth rate? This problem has both a combinatorial and a
geometric origin. For the combinatorial part, Grigorchuck and Cohen

Abstract: A permutation representation of a group G is called highly transitive if it is transitive on k-tuples of points for every k. Until just a few years ago groups admitting such permutation representations were thought of as rare. I will focus on three rather recent papers: G-Garion, Hall-Osin, Gelander-G-Meiri (in preparation) showing that such groups are in fact very common.