The British government will invest £30 million (US$45 million) in a research centre to further develop Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web, writes Joab Jackson for IDG News Service. The Institute for Web Science will be run by Berners-Lee, who formulated the basic protocols for the web, along with University of Southampton artificial intelligence professor Nigel Shadbolt. "This institute will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies and ensure the government is taking the right funding decisions to position the UK as a world leader," said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in a statement.

India's government has appointed a task force to create a national database of academic qualifications to ensure confidentiality, authenticity, online verification and easy retrieval of degrees, write Ravi Krishnan, Pallavi Singh and Sapna Agarwal for LiveMint.com and The Wall Street Journal. The team, which will submit its report on the e-certificate project by the end of this month, will appoint one of two depositories - the National Securities Depository Ltd or Central Depository Services (India) Ltd - to create and manage the database, the first time such a storehouse is being planned on a nationwide scale. 

An increasing number of universities are allowing senior students with no job offers to stay another year under cheaper tuition as the preference for fresh graduates remains strong in the job market. As major Japanese companies tend to employ new graduates, many senior students with no job offers believe that it is better to repeat their final year and continue to look for job opportunities as college students.

Universities should be given the freedom to charge students whatever tuition fee they like, the body representing the country's 750 largest employers of graduates will say today. The Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) says that lifting the cap - currently £3,240 a year - is needed if standards are to be maintained in the wake of £518m of cuts being made by the Government.

Two years ago, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) embarked on an ambitious overhaul of its storied research labs, responsible for some of the most momentous computing innovation of the last 40 years, writes Aaron Ricadela for Business Week. Now, HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee is turning his attention to the company's half-dozen international labs, aiming to generate cutting-edge development from scientific outposts in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Signalling its emphasis on international research and development, HP opened its seventh lab in Singapore on 24 February, establishing a research hub in a key country in HP's fastest-growing region. The Singapore lab will collaborate with HP labs in Bristol, England and Palo Alto in California on research into cloud computing, as well as with HP's services and software groups.

The Israeli state has come up with a plan to diminish the 'brain drain', writes Meirav Arlosoroff for Haartez. It has proposed establishing a new fund to provide the jobs needed to keep the country's best and brightest academics from moving overseas, or to bring them back home. The fund, to be managed by the Council for Higher Education, will invest in centres of research excellence that provide positions for repatriated scientists and engineers. The Higher Education Council presented the plan to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, in coordination with the Finance Ministry and the National Economic Council. He is expected to approve the plan. The Stars Plan calls for the establishment of 30 research centres at a cost of NIS 45 million (US$12 million) each, bringing the total cost to NIS 1.3 billion.