Technion Computer Science building
Technion Computer Science buildingCreative Commons

Officials from two Boston-area universities and a technology company announced new partnerships this week with institutions in Israel, deals signed as part of Governor Deval Patrick’s ongoing trade mission to the country, the Boston Globe reported.

MIT’s International Science and Technology Initiative and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, which has a large engineering school, established a seed fund that will help pay for research at the two schools.

“The sky is the limit,” Joseph Kost, Ben-Gurion engineering dean and professor, told the Globe Tuesday. “We’re very much looking forward to taking advantage of this seed fund so that we can eventually extend it even further.”

MIT has similar seed funds with universities in other countries, but the agreement is the first it has established in Israel.

Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art announced the creation of a program that will select an emerging Israeli video artist biannually to hold an exhibition at both museums.

The chosen artist will get a $10,000 prize and have a catalog of their work printed.

The program is endowed by Lazar Fruchter and his wife, Chami, benefactors of the Rose and parents of a son who graduated from Brandeis in 2006 and a daughter who is a rising junior.

Christopher Bedford, director of the Rose, said the program is also intended to raise awareness of video art in Israel, which he said is sophisticated and of particularly high quality.

Meanwhile, Needham-based software company PTC and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, a public research university in Haifa, unveiled a partnership through which PTC will provide funding and donated software to help the school establish a “center of excellence” for the study of robotics and 3D digital technology.

“PTC has had a presence in Israel for more than 20 years, and it is an important center for research for the company,” said company spokesman Eric Snow.