We would like to welcome you to the FAST-SKA Pathfinders Synergies meeting. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is funded by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and managed by the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), together with Guizhou provincial government as a cooperation partner. The FAST has three outstanding features: the unique karst depression in Guizhou as the site, the active main reflector of 500 m diameter which corrects the spherical aberration, and the light-weight focus cabin driven by cables plus a parallel robot as a secondary adjustable system. Multi-beam and multi-band receivers will be installed covering a frequency range of 70MHz - 3 GHz (with capacity for upgrade to X band). FAST is being commissioned at the moment with the first key science drivers on Pulsar and HI.

Construction of MeerKAT, a 64-element array of 13.5-m offset parabolic antennas, is well underway close to the SKA central site onthe South African Karoo plateau and should start its Large Science Surveys (LSPs)in 2018. It will be merged with 133 15-m antennae ~2023 to become SKA1-mid. Large surveys will also get soon underway on the SKA pathfinders ASKAP, in Australia and APERTIF in The Netherlands. The CHILES survey (high-z galaxies at HI) is well underway and CHIME will start soon his “intensity mapping” experiments.

Both with the FAST and the SKA pathfinders, resulting from the SKA global cooperation, we will be able to detect hundreds and even some thousands of new pulsars, as well as study in details the HI gas in nearby galaxies. With the improvements in sensitivity and resolution by the combination of FAST and the pathfinders instruments, the survey area of their common sky is still quite large in probing the low HI column density gas (cosmic web), low mass galaxies and the HI intensity mapping for cosmological BAO measurement.

In order to strengthen the science cooperation betweenthe FAST (the world’s largest single dish telescope) in China and the different precursors of the SKA, we propose a 2.5 days workshop, to be held in Pingtang (close to the FAST site), in Guizhou province on June 13-15, 2018. The main goal is to explore the synergies between the different SKA pathfinders and FAST. The main science themes will be: pulsar research, HI research, HI intensity mapping, Cosmic Magnetism and Radio Instrumentation.