F-theory has emerged as a promising framework for engineering
supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) in string theory. In
this talk, we will describe recent progress in this field with an
emphasis on connecting "local" and "global" approaches. The "local"
approach, which we shall review, focuses on only that part of the
internal geometry probed by particle physics experiments. This is the
analog of bottom-up phenomenology and has led to a variety of "local"
models that can reproduce several important qualitative features of
the Standard Model. The "global" approach, however, is the analog of
top-down phenomenology and focuses only on compact, globally
consistent string backgrounds. We will describe both approaches in
detail and how merging them tightly constrains the particle physics
models that can arise from F-theory models in general.
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