Kyle Gschwend of The Stanford Daily recently reported, “After 18 months of planning, the Dean of the School of Humanities & Sciences, Richard Saller, recently gave final approval for a new center that will fill the need for a unified genomics research center on campus. Led by genetics professor Carlos Bustamante and biology professor Marc Feldman Ph.D. ’69, the new Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics is predicted to improve the University’s reputation in the field, as well as draw top talent to Stanford. While the official University announcement has not yet been made, outgoing School of Medicine Dean Philip Pizzo shared news about the center in his last full newsletter, which was published on Nov. 5. ‘There was a recognition among the administration of how significant and vital it was to support this project and take a risk,’ Saller said.” Read more

Quebec will soon have a new Centre of Excellence for Semantics. A new article reports, “Irosoft Inc., a leader in document and records management solutions as well as in legislative information management solutions, and CRIM (Computer Research Institute of Montréal), an IT applied research centre dedicated to the development and transfer of cutting-edge technology and know-how, announced today that they have signed a long-term partnership agreement to join their respective expertise in textual and vocal analysis, Semantic Web, and cloud computing. The agreement includes the development and production of a software platform accessible by as many people as possible that will host and sell textual and vocal analysis tools as well as semantic processing tools.” Read more