PIMS Year in Review 2018

2018 was an excellent year for PIMS! Three Collaborative Research Groups and the Postdoctoral Training Centre in Stochastics were active. A new initiative called Callysto was launched to enrich the wide array of education outreach programs operated by PIMS. We hosted an intertwined collection of summer events aimed at addressing diversity challenges in mathematics. Our strategic partnership with CNRS was enhanced with the PIMS-Europe Fellowship and Student Mobility Programs and a pilot project with Germany was initiated. We continued to develop connections with industrial and non-profit partners.

A new CRG focused on high dimensional data analysis launched in Summer 2018 with a kickoff retreat, a summer school and a workshop. An ongoing CRG, linking researchers from Australia, British Columbia, China, and Washington, participated

in a special year focused on Geometric Analysis and Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations at Australia National University. The CRG on Geometric and Cohomological Methods in Algebra hosted a summer school with partners at the University of Chicago. The Postdoctoral Training Centre in Stochastics (PTCS), with joint support from NSERC and NSF, maintained a high level of activity connecting postdocs and researchers in probability at multiple sites across the PIMS network.

Together with our partner Cybera, PIMS was awarded $1.5M from the Government of Canada’s CanCODE program to launch Callysto in 2018. The Callysto initiative developed open education resources for students in grades 5-12 leveraging a cloud-hosted interactive computing platform called Jupyter. More than fifty undergraduate students were employed by PIMS during Summer 2018 to help develop content and run events for Callysto. PIMS’ work on Callysto and other initiatives in interactive computing were showcased in a special session at JupyterCon in New York City.