Obscuration and reprocessing in the cosmic history of active galactic nuclei

The Cofin 2000 project titled ‘Obscuration and reprocessing in the cosmic history of AGN’ aims to study the physical and morphologic characteristics of the obscuring material in active galactic nuclei (AGN), and the cosmic history of the obscured AGN, to be compared with the history of unobscured AGN and with that of star formation. The project is in progress; as it is still too early to make a synthesis of the results, we will instead discuss separately the status of several different lines of research.