I will present refined generating series formulae for characters of cohomology representations of external products of suitable coefficients on complex quasi-projective varieties, which include many of the classical results in the literature as special cases. Important specializations of these formulae include generating series for symmetric and alternating powers of such coefficients and, in particular, generating series for intersection cohomology Hodge numbers and Goresky-MacPherson intersection cohomology signatures of symmetric products of complex projective varieties. The talk should be accessible to anyone with basic knowledge of algebraic geometry and topology. (Joint work with J. Schuermann.) Speaker(s): Laurentiu Maxim (University of Wisconsin)