ASU and WIPO Define Specific Plans for Holding a Joint International Seminar

The concept of the patent seminar, which is planned to be held this October with the involvement of representatives of the World Intellectual Property Organization, public authorities and the scientific community, has been defined at the today’s meeting.

Today, Astrakhan State University has seen another meeting of ASU Acting Rector Konstantin Markelov with Geoffrey Westgate, the Head of the Support Section of PCT Translation Division, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

The ASU partner has paid a visit to Astrakhan to participate in the final exam of the Master’s degree students of the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation and to offer consultations on international terminology projects of the Caspian School students. During his talk with the Russian colleagues, Geoffrey Westgate mentioned a high level of ASU students and their definite progress in the professional sphere. It should be recalled that the Caspian School MA students are actively involved into a project on improving WIPO Pearl — a multilingual terminology database — and the first results are already published on the WIPO website with a mention of the ASU students’ contribution. Besides, according to the WIPO expert, the first MA thesis on terminology has shown excellent results — 97% of the terms were accepted. Another evidence of a higher standard of teaching at the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation is the fact that one of the Astrakhan students who participated in the WIPO fellowship programme ranked so high that after the fellowship was completed she got offered a job in the organization.

Speaking about other important areas of cooperation between ASU and WIPO, Geoffrey Westgate also mentioned a possibility of involving ASU into WIPO Green activities, related to sustainable technology and green energy.

Another highly promising joint project is a national patent seminar, which is planned to be held in October 2019 at Astrakhan State University. As estimated by the organizers, the event will bring together about 150-200 experts — inventors, technology transfer experts, innovators, representatives of Russian and foreign universities and companies.

In his turn, Konstantin Markelov said that the university had already started preparing for the event. The ASU Rector also noted that the information on the Astrakhan patent seminar had aroused interest at the highest level: Federation Council Deputy Chair Ilias Umakhanov himself expressed readiness to support the event.

Geoffrey Westgate considered the information, received from his Russian colleague, very valuable as it already allows to define the level of the invited experts and determine a necessary pool of the seminar participants from WIPO, as well as strategies of speakers’ work on their reports.