New York and Israel: Stroke Of Genius

[JStone]

NY Daily News

And the winner is . . . New York City.

Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology will establish a world-class, high-tech graduate school in the five boroughs as the winners of a global competition.

Congratulations to both powerhouse institutions.

Congratulations to Mayor Bloomberg for inviting the best minds to open an applied sciences school.

Congratulations to all the digital geniuses who made a run for the designation.

This school will not simply be a school. As envisioned, it will be an academic center that puts New York where the city must be — at the forefront of the electronic revolution that is remaking global business.
Here is a watershed moment of economic reinvention for the city.

A new analysis forecasts that the school will generate $23 billion in economic activity over the next three decades, 20,000 construction jobs and 8,000 permanent positions. It is also expected to generate 600 new companies with up to 30,000 permanent jobs.

The campus research capacity will give the city’s existing industries — finance, real estate, media, entertainment, health care — a source of new ideas for facing a world that now changes by the hour and day.

Some 27 institutions responded to the city’s first request for expressions of interest, a number that was whittled down over time to a select few. Among the big names were Silicon Valley’s Stanford University, a sudden dropout last week, and Columbia, New York University and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University.

Bloomberg said the city is exploring avenues for helping some of them open additional science programs — and that is wise, because many of their ideas would be further boons to the city.

New York State’s own Cornell, already a major presence in the city, will team with Technion, on the cutting edge in Israel, to accept the first brainiacs in 2012 and then to spend $2 billion building facilities on Roosevelt Island. Cornell got a major boost toward that goal with an astonishing $350 million gift from a donor who prefers to remain anonymous.

Plans call for eventually accommodating 2,500 master’s and Ph.D. candidates taught by 280 faculty members in a curriculum that integrates high-tech studies with media, health care, architecture and engineering.
Stroke of geniuses - New York Daily News