In a ceremony in Jakarta, Indonesia, on 21 October, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the ALICE collaboration, marking the first official collaboration between an Indonesian institute and an experiment at CERN. Paolo Giubellino, the ALICE Spokesperson, and Emmanuel Tsesmelis, CERN's Deputy Head of International Relations, attended the signing ceremony, at which LIPI was represented by Lukman Hakim, the institute’s chair, and Laksana Tri Handoko, the ALICE LIPI team leader.

With the agreement, LIPI will initially contribute at ALICE in the area of grid computing. The team there has installed two clusters, in Bandung and Cibinong, which have been connected to the ALICE grid. There is also a strong interest in the ALICE O2 Project. In addition, the high-energy physics group being created at LIPI is expected to contribute to the ALICE physics programme and to the upgrade of the experiment. The agreement exemplifies LIPI's effort to be more active and gain international recognition as a research centre of excellence.

More recently, Bangladesh took the first steps in collaborating with CERN, when Education Secretary Kamal Abdul Naser Chowdhury visited the laboratory to sign an Expression of Interest, together CERN’s Director-General, Rolf Heuer. The implementation of the Expression of Interest could pave the way for an International Co-operation Agreement that would further formalize and broaden the collaboration between CERN and the high-energy physics community in Bangladesh.

The current agreement will help scientists, engineers and students from Bangladesh gain valuable experience in both experimental and theoretical particle physics, as wells as aspects of particle accelerators, particle detectors and information technology. In this way, it will facilitate the professional development and research skills of scientists, engineers and students from research organizations and universities across the country, and could lead towards new scientific practices for nuclear scientists, research organizations and university students.