New York City announced yesterday that it had received 18 expressions of interest in establishing a research center in the city from universities and corporations around the world and city officials have identified four city-owned sites that might serve as a home for the research center for applied science and engineering that they hope to establish, according to an article in today's edition of The New York Times by Patrick McGeehan.

The list of institutions that responded includes the Abo Akademi University in Finland, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, as well as schools in England, India and Switzerland and American schools as far away as California and as close by as Manhattan and Hoboken, New Jersey, the article said.

A total of 27 schools responded, some teaming up with each other or with corporations to send joint submissions. "One joint submission came from New York University, Carnegie Mellon University, the City University of New York, the University of Toronto and I.B.M., the article noted.

"For sheer enthusiasm and ambition," the article continued, "it may prove difficult to match Stanford University, which has proposed building its first degree-granting satellite campus away from its home base in Palo Alto, Calif., said Lisa Lapin, a Stanford spokeswoman. Stanford has suggested that it would revive the Goldwater Hospital campus on Roosevelt Island in the East River as an outpost that could eventually hold as many as 2,200 students and a few hundred faculty and staff members. Stanford estimates that the initial phase of the campus, which could be completed by the end of 2015, would cost about $250 million. The university expects that its own spending would be supplemented by the city and philanthropists, Ms. Lapin said."

"City officials," the article said, "have not said how much they would be willing to spend on the project, but they have identified four sites that the city might be willing to make available to the winning bidder. Along with the old hospital site on the southern end of Roosevelt Island, they include space on Governors Island in New York Harbor and complexes of buildings at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and on Staten Island."

The article said that "Seth W. Pinsky, the president of the city's Economic Development Corporation, said that the respondents had expressed interest in all of the sites. Mr. Pinsky said he expected the development corporation to release a request for proposals, the second of two steps in the solicitation process, in the middle of the year. But he said officials had not decided whether bidding would be limited to the first respondents."