Aquincum Institute of Technology, Budapest, IT & BT shaking hands
Posted by attilachordash on September 18, 2008
There is a nice initiative now in Budapest dedicated to the present and future of high technology: a new private university momentarily dubbed as Aquincum Institute of Technology (AIT) will be built near to the Graphisoft Park in Óbuda (Aquincum) concentrating on competitive information-/biotechnology (mainly bioinformatics) education and entrepreneurship.
The main instigator of the project is Gábor Bojár, founder and CEO of the most successful Hungarian software company, Graphisoft.
According to this source:
“The company aims to become the global leader in building-architectural software solutions, hence it must found the training of professionals on a business basis, Bojar said. The new school is to be opened in 2010.”
Mr. Bojár convinced world-class Hungarian scientists and businessmen like Wolf-prize winner discrete mathematician and computer scientist László Lovász, inventor and architecture professor Ernő Rubik, former Office guru, intentional programmer and space tourist Simonyi Charles and scale-free network theorist Albert-László Barabási amongst others to back the idea of a profit-oriented technology university sustained by the market itself.
It’s not too hard to recognize some particular Silicon Valley virtues or models behind the idea of an university like AIT let’s just think about the innovative environment at Stanford, intellectual and entrepreneurial home of the HP, Sun Microsystems and Google founders. What I have in mind here concerning the biotechnology part is The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) which is ‘a cooperative effort between the state of California, the University of California campuses at Berkeley, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz, and industry and venture capital partners’.
The idea can be traced back to a San Francisco dinner after the Graphisoft IPO where Mr. Bojár realised how highly ranked is education as an ideal investment target amongst businessmen so he invested around € 5 million and the final sum should be around 20-30 million euros.
According to the interesting plans 1/3 of the students will be recruited for getting master’s degrees (PhD training later) from Hungary, 1/3 from Asia and 1/3 from the USA.
Links in English:
The account of Alex Pang, research director of The Institute For The Future, on his visit to Graphisoft Park.
http://www.mbtmag.com/articleXml/LN852589790.html
Links in Hungarian:
http://www.prherald.hu/cikk2.php?idc=20080916-171333
http://www.edupress.hu/index.php?at=egycikk&HirID=19417
http://hvg.hu/itthon/20080429_graphisoft_bojar_informatikai_egyetem_IT.aspx
