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SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic, non-profit foundation established in 1998. 
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Scoop.it!
Since Geneva and Lausanne are near by this article on Nature.com caught my eye. In addition to the local interest as aspect of the article - what is also interesting is the role of modern sensors, simulation and computer models to help determine evidence for historic reports that when combined give us insight for new developments in the region.
In ad 563, more than a century after the Romans gave up control of what is now Geneva, Switzerland, a deadly tsunami on Lake Geneva poured over the city walls. Originating from a rock fall where the River Rhône enters at the opposite end of the lake to Geneva, the tsunami destroyed surrounding villages, people and livestock, according to two known historical accounts. Researchers now report the first geological evidence from the lake to support these ancient accounts. The findings, published online in Nature Geoscience, suggest that the region would be wise to evaluate the risk today, with more than one million inhabitants living on the lake's shores, including 200,000 people in Geneva alone. Click on the image or the title to learn more.
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The Systems Dynamics Society is having its 30th annual Conference in St.Gallen Switzerland on 21st and 22nd July. - The conference program is awesome and this is likely a must visit if you do systems modeling or use tools like VenSim, PowerSim, iThink or Strata for systems modeling and simulation. Certainly worth following. Click on headline to learn more.
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Kenta Biotech, a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Zurich-Schlieren, Switzerland, focusing on the development of innovative fully human monoclonal antibodies for the prevention and treatment of life-threatening infections, has announced that it is relocating from Bern to Bio-Technopark in Zurich-Schlieren, the Silicon Valley of Swiss Biotechnology. Founded in 2006 as a Berna Biotech (today Crucell Switzerland AG) spin-off, Kenta Biotech is entering a new era in its development of innovative treatment of life-threatening infections. A strategic move for Kenta Biotech, and a good win for Zurich but a sad loss for Bern.
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The Swiss chemical and pharmaceutical industry – accounts for over 4 % of Gross Domestic Product and is the second most important industry, behind the engineering industry for the swiss economy. Good overview of the companies pharma industry.
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Good inverview with Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber, Director of the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab, IDSIA. His research team’s artificial neural networks (NNs) have won many international awards, and recently were the first to achieve human-competitive performance on various benchmark data sets. IDSIA are probably the current world leaders in ANN research and the quality of what they do is rather insipiring. worth reading.
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Financial regulators and policy makers should focus on financial institutions that are ‘too central to fail’ as well as those that are ‘too big to fail’, research published in Scientific Reports this week suggests. T. Inspired by feedback-centrality measures in networks, such as PageRank, Stefano Battiston and colleagues in the Systems Design research team at ETH Zurich, Switzerland introduce a new measure of systemic impact, which they call DebtRank. They use DebtRank to analyze a recently released data set with information on the institutions that received aid from the US Federal Reserve Bank through its US$1.2 trillion emergency loans programmes from 2008 to 2010. The authors find that during the peak of the crisis, a group of 22 financial institutions, which received most of the loans, became more central to the network, which means that the default of each one would have a larger economic impact on the whole network. Even small, dispersed shocks to individual banks could thus have triggered the default of a large portion of the system. The authors note that because the network of impact used in the study is a proxy of the real, unknown network, the findings should be regarded with caution, but the study shows the kinds of insights that can be gained using DebtRank. Click on image or title to learn more.
's comment August 10, 2012 6:20 PM
Cool finding..so it look that it is not enough to control for the big banks...also the relatively small banks can trigger a systemic default...!
Phillip Trotter's comment,
August 14, 2012 5:59 PM
hi S. Its related to how the different banks are interconnected in networks. There is a good article explaining how page rank and similar network feedback metric systems can be applied to ecosystems to identify key species that sustain that ecosystem. (see http://carbon-based-ghg.blogspot.fr/2009/09/modifying-googles-page-rank-algorithm.html) The same concept occurs in debt rank - size doesn't always matter - its the domino effect and dependency chains with other organizations or degree of network connectivity that impacts the ecosystem. A large or small private bank can fail - if it is relatively independent - then its simply an isolated bank. Think Bairings in the UK - its failure due to Leeson's trading didn't cause a systemic failure because it was largely an independent bank. However the Sarakin scandal in Japan in the 1970's and 80's threatened the failure of a number of international banks who were connected through loans and loan guarantees. The financial crisis of the the last decade is similar - the degree of network connectedness on subprime products and underwriting made the entire banking sector susceptible. Applying ecological modeling tools and topology tools like network analysis - can help a lot in understanding the current financial crisis.
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Both the ATLAS and CMS experiments have observed a new fundamental particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson. Article form Scientific Computing discusses whats next for the CERN teams and physics community.
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French biotech sector strugglingNature.com (blog)And the funding picture is no brighter for the survivors, according to the 150-strong association France Biotech.
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Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, with over SFr9.5 billion ($10.35 billion) in profits for 2011, is looking to secure its future and betting on personalised medicine in the process.
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Swiss Institute fo Bioinformatics celebrates its 15th birthday. SIB is an important research organisation in switzerland and internationally, offering several important databases (e.g. SwissProt) and software tools used by researchers worldwide. Congrats to everyone involved.