Wonderful Compactification of an Arrangement of Subvarieties -- Li Li

Consider an arrangement of nonsingular subvarieties in a nonsingular algebraic variety. We define a compactification of the complement by replacing these subvarieties with a normal crossing divisor. This compactification is obtained by a sequence of blow-ups along smooth centers. Some examples will be given. We also give a canonical decomposition of its Chow motive.