The Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, allocated 50 dunams on Roosevelt Island to the Cornell and Technion Applied Science-Engineering Research Center; The construction of a campus for sustainable technological innovation will begin in January; The first phase will open in2017
The Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, signed the 99-year lease, which will pave the way for the construction of the Science-Engineering-Applied Research Center campus on Roosevelt Island, exactly two years after Cornell and the Technion won the New York City competition to establish the center. It is a revolutionary model for graduate technological education, and it positions itself as a leading global institution, granting advanced degrees and conducting research that fosters technology, innovation and commercialization.
The land lease will allow construction to begin in January, and the first classroom on Roosevelt Island is slated to open in 2017. The students began studying last fall in space donated by Google at the company's headquarters in Chelsea on Eighth Avenue. The entire complex, which will cover 48.5 dunams, will be completed by 2043 and will house about 2,000 students and about 280 faculty members and researchers. The campus will be designed to support the center's focus on innovation, entrepreneurship and collaboration between academia and industry.
"We have set a goal to make New York City a global capital of technological innovation, and the new campus on Roosevelt Island is a key factor in our strategy to do so," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "This is one of the most ambitious development projects that any city has ever undertaken, a long-term project that will help add thousands of jobs to the city's economy for decades to come."
"We believe with all our hearts that the path to the continued growth of New York City will be defined in large part by partnerships that begin with New York State's academic institutions," said New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo. "This project leverages two of the world's most renowned institutions in a way that will promote technological innovation in New York State, create jobs and spur business investment."
"The new center is proof that governments and universities can collaborate to innovate and support economic growth, and we will be forever grateful for Mayor Bloomberg's leadership in bringing the vision of the campus building to fruition," said Cornell University President David Skorton. "The campus on Roosevelt Island was built for the future, to be a place where the great ideas of research, new companies and extraordinary talents will be born that will change New York and the world."
"Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg's vision, New York City is rapidly becoming a global innovation center," said Technion President Professor Peretz Lavi. "Through the Technion-Cornell's Joan and Irwin Jacobs Institute of Innovation - our international partnership with the new center - we look forward to helping advance the city's future as the technological capital of the world."
The Applied Sciences NYC competition was launched by Mayor Bloomberg in 2011 in an effort to leverage the significant growth in recent times, and to create an opportunity for future growth in jobs and businesses in the technology sector in New York City, and to develop, in cooperation with the municipality, a more diverse economy for the city. In July 2011, the city issued a request for proposal (RFP), calling for universities, institutions or consortia to develop and operate a campus (new, or expansion of an existing campus) in the city in exchange for capital, access to city-owned land, support and cooperation with the Bloomberg administration. The proposal of Cornell and the Technion was chosen based on a model of technological education for advanced degrees, while emphasizing the interrelationships between academia and industry and fields of study relevant to the future. The completion of the campus on Roosevelt Island will almost double the number of students for advanced engineering degrees in the master's and doctoral programs in New York City.
The academic uses on the campus will include, according to the plan, classrooms, laboratories, teaming areas and lecture halls, as well as incubator areas that will be used to foster entrepreneurship. The rest of the campus area will be dedicated to business areas that will be designed in a way that will encourage interaction between academia and industry, residential uses, an area for training senior managers, and secondary uses such as procurement, to support the faculty members, employees and students on campus, as well as the creation of a new open space.
The campus master plan, prepared by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and James Corner Field Operations, includes several innovative components and infrastructure for a river-to-river campus with expansive views, a series of green public spaces and seamless connections between indoor and outdoor areas. Advanced technologies will be integrated with the goal of creating one of the leading campuses in the world in regard to the environment and saving energy - a campus that will not only realize, but also develop, new environmental technologies.
A sustainable and innovative building will be designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning office of Thom Main, and unlike traditional academic buildings will be inspired by the world of technology; It will offer open spaces and large areas designed for collaborations. If it were completed today, the first-phase building would be the largest energy-balanced building in the eastern United States - that is, it produces all the energy it needs in its area.
A neighboring commercial building, designed by Weiss/Manfredi and developed by Forest City, will bring together inventors from industry, world-renowned researchers and energetic start-ups under one roof - a real representation of the mission of the campus: a merger between academia and industry with the aim of encouraging innovation for the benefit of the public. A residential building, which will ensure the campus operates seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, was designed by Handel Architects and developed by Hudson. The building will be built with the aim of providing comfortable and affordable housing for students, faculty members and employees. It will be based on principles of energy saving and will thus advance the campus' goals in the field of sustainability.
Other plans concern a center for training senior managers and a hotel, which will help position the center as a magnet for innovation in New York City through holding conferences, a program for training senior managers and an area for academic workshops, as well as a hotel and restaurant.
The campus includes the area where Goldwater Hospital previously operated, which was transferred to an innovative hospital in Harlem. The patients of Goldwater Hospital were transferred to the new hospital last month.
The studies began this year in a complex donated by "Google" in Chelsea. Now there are master's and third degree students studying there under the guidance of excellent faculty members, while cooperating with dozens of leading organizations in the industry, which contribute to the students knowledge in fields such as computer science, electrical and computer engineering, information science, performance research and business administration. This year, cooperation with students in the schools of New York City also began, and work is being done with many organizations with the aim of bringing technological education to a wide audience.
Starting in January, the Technion-Cornell's Joan and Irwin Jacobs Innovation Institute will begin accepting some postdoctoral students at the current campus. Later in 2014, the Jacobs Institute will launch a master's degree track in the field of Connective Media, designed to train engineering and technological entrepreneurs required in the media world to lead the ongoing digital development in the industry. Students in this program, which will last two years, will receive degrees from both the Technion and Cornell.
Professor Mark Zilberstein of the Technion won the Yahoo ACE award
The award is given to young professors at leading research universities in the world, who conduct research relevant to Yahoo
Professor Mark Zilberstein, from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion, won the Yahoo ACE Award ("Award for Academic Career Enhancement"), which is awarded to young professors at leading research universities in the world who conduct research relevant to Yahoo.
Professor Zilberstein's research spans several areas, including heterogeneous architectures from different perspectives (software tools, simplicity of operating systems, etc.); high-performance computing in grids and clouds; Distributed storage systems and parallel processing in multi-core processors and graphics processors (GPUs).
In the announcement of the award, it was stated that Professor Silberstein is an expert in these fields of research, and that "aspects of Silberstein's research are closely related to the interests of the systems research group at Yahoo Laboratories in Haifa. Scientists at Yahoo Labs intend to collaborate with Professor Silberstein on diverse projects, including the scalable implementation of computational learning algorithms on high-performance hardware."
"I would be very happy to have a fruitful collaboration with the scientists at the Yahoo labs," said Professor Silberstein, "with the goal of promoting breakthroughs in research and applications that will benefit the real world."
Professor Zilberstein recently joined the electrical engineering faculty at the Technion, after a post-doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, under the guidance of Professor Emmett Wichel. He completed his doctorate in computer science at the Technion in 2010, under the guidance of Professor Assaf Shuster and Professor Dan Geiger.
The Signal Processing Association Award for 2013 was awarded to Professor Yunina Elder from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion
Professor Elder, the head of the sampling laboratory in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion, serves as a member of the Higher Education Council (HEC), as a member of the Young National Academy of Sciences, as a member of the committee for making higher education accessible to the ultra-Orthodox, and as a consultant to high-tech companies. Read more
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Prof. Yunina Elder in her laboratory. Photography: Click photographers, Technion spokesmen
Professor Yunina Alder won the prestigious 2013 Society for Signal Processing Award, for "enormous contributions to compressed sensing, sub-Nyquist frequency sampling, convex optimization and statistical signal processing."
Professor Elder, head of the sampling laboratory at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion, serves as a member of the Higher Education Council (HEC), as a member of the Young National Academy of Sciences, as a member of the committee for making higher education accessible to the ultra-Orthodox, and as a consultant to high-tech companies. In addition, she serves as a research fellow at MIT and a visiting professor at Stanford University.
Professor Alder has developed a new paradigm for sampling and processing signals below the Nyquist frequency, which is considered the minimum sampling limit of analog signals. She managed to lower the sampling rate without compromising the quality of the signal, thus enabling miniaturization and better communication. Beyond the development of the theory and algorithms, she achieved a global breakthrough in the field of sampling, when she built together with her students and the development team in the laboratory a prototype of an electronic card that enables broadband signal sampling using an extremely low sampling rate. These methods can enable the miniaturization of many devices: from a smart phone, through ultrasound to radar.
The said invention has many potential applications, such as improving radar performance and fast XNUMXD ultrasound. Another potential market is the medical market, where the sampling speed translates into the patient's exposure time to the device emitting dangerous radiation. From the economic point of view, there is a big advantage here, since more patients will be able to be tested. The defense market is also very interested in an invention that enables scanning of a very wide frequency range in a quick time.
Professor Elder has won many awards, including the Krill Award for excellence in scientific research, the Bruno Award from the Rothschild Foundation, the Weizmann Award for Exact Sciences, the Herschel-Rich Award for Scientific Innovation, an award from the Municipality of Haifa for trailblazing women, and more.
The IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award is the main award in the field of signal processing, and it is given to researchers who have made a significant contribution, for years, to the theory and application of technical issues in the spectrum of the fields in which the society deals - a contribution evident in publications, patents or a recognized influence on the field. Professor Elder received the award this year together with Professor Alan Hero, who was formerly the head of the Signal Processing Society and is one of the pillars of the community (he received the third millennium medal of the IEEE).
