2009 Annual Report - Perimeter Institute

Fast Fact
• Nearly 1300 PI seminars, talks and
colloquia are archived on PIRSA.
• Researchers and students around the
world can view scientific events at
PI as they happen via PIRSA, the
Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar
Archive. With recordings dating from
2002, and a new user interface
launched in 2008, PIRSA provides a
permanent, free, searchable, and citable
online archive of video recorded
seminars, conferences, workshops,
and courses. Playback is available
in Windows and Flash formats, with
MP3 audio files and PDFs of slides and
supporting materials from talks. PIRSA
is becoming a digital focal point for the
international scientific community— in
the past year, over 33,000 unique
visitors from 136 countries accessed
PIRSA over 63,000 times.
See http://pirsa.org
interNational linkages
In early 2009, Perimeter Institute and the Centre for Theoretical
Cosmology (CTC) at the University of Cambridge concluded an agreement
that will encourage collaborative research, and provide for faculty members
and postdoctoral fellows to conduct regular scientific exchange visits
up to several months. Additional agreements are in process with the
Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, the Institute for the Physics
and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) in Japan, the Stanford Center
for Theoretical Physics and CERN’s Theory Division.
To increase contact between theory and experiment, PI is expanding
its engagement with national and international experimental and
observational centres such as the LHC, SNOLAB, and the Planck
satellite; VISTA, VLT, the SKA and other giant observatories; and
LIGO, LISA and other gravitational wave detectors. By encouraging PI
postdoctoral fellows and other researchers to visit these facilities and
collaborate with observers and experimentalists, PI can help to stimulate
new experimental and observational tests of fundamental theory.