The 18th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (GR18) and the 7th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves were held concurrently in Sydney, Australia, July 8-14 2007.
Over 600 scientists converged on the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Center at spectacular Darling Harbour. There were 15 plenary talks and 55 parallel sessions. A typical day had one ``Amaldi'' and two ``GR'' plenary talks and there were five ``GR'' and only one ``Amaldi'' parallel sessions in the afternoon. The format was a bit of a departure from the tradition of Amaldis, where in the past there was no division between plenaries and parallels.
During the conference the Committee of the International Society of General Relativity met. Among other topics, the results for the election of the president of the society were announced, Abhay Ashtekar was elected. The next venue for the GR conference was also selected, the responsibility going to a proposal from a group of Mexican institutions to hold the conference at the Banamex conference center at Mexico City. The Gravitational Waves International Committee (GWIC) also met before the conference started, and among other things decided the venue for the next Amaldi Conference, choosing Columbia University in New York for 2009 among several contenders.
The Basilis Xanthopoulos prize was presented jointly to Martin Bojowald (PennState) and Thomas Thiemann (Albert Einstein Institute) for their seminal contributions in loop quantum gravity. The GWIC thesis prize was awarded to Yoichi Aso (University of Tokyo), his thesis was on ``Active Vibration Isolation for a Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detector using a Suspension Point Interferometer''.
A conference as large as this one is impossible to summarize comprehensively at any level of detail. The plenary program had talks by Stan Whitcomb (LIGO) on ground based gravitational wave detectors, Laurent Freidel (Perimeter Institute) on spin foam models of the dynamics of quantum space-time, Steve McMillan (Drexel) on gravitational dynamics of large stellar systems, Badri Krishnan (Albert Einstein Institute) on quasi-local black hole horizons, Bernd Brügmann (Jena) on numerical relativity, Daniel Eisenstein (Arizona) on observing dark energy, Peter Schneider (Bonn) on cosmological probes of gravitational lensing, Renate Loll (Utrecht) on the emergence of space-time in dynamical triangulation quantum gravity Francis Everitt on Gravity Probe B and STEP, Hans Ringstrom (Stockholm) on some rigorous results on cosmic censorship, Jonathan Feng (Irvine) on collider physics and cosmology, Daniel Shaddock (JPL) on LISA, Maria Alessandra Papa (Albert Einstein Institute) on gravitational wave astronomy from ground and space, Robert Myers (Perimeter Institute) on the quark soup (``al dente'') at RHIC and its connection to gravity via string theory, Ralf Schützold on possible analogue gravity experiments involving horizons. There were lectures to the general public in the evenings by Kip Thorne (``The warped side of the universe: from the big bang to black holes and gravitational waves'') and Roger Penrose (``What happened before the big bang?'').
As for a personal point of view, I liked the summaries about the meeting that mathematician Marni Dee Sheppeard wrote for her blog. Go to,
http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html
and scroll down a few screens.
This was the first joint GR/Amaldi. From comments I gathered people seemed to like the idea of a joint meeting. The ``traditional GR crowd'' liked the more extensive exposure to the emerging area of gravitational wave detection that the Amaldi provided, and the ``traditional Amaldi'' people welcomed the more broad choice of plenary talks and the opportunity to venture into parallel sessions of interest to gravitational wave detection (e.g. numerical relativity) that may not be well represented in a traditional Amaldi. I believe there is enthusiasm among the interested parties to repeat the experiment in the future. The GR's occur every three years and the Amaldis every two, so perhaps another joint meeting could be possible at the time of the GR after the next one.