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The Beacon at a glance
Take a peek at the activities and offering of our digital innovation community.
Stay informed! Sign up for our newsletter
Take a peek at the activities and offering of our digital innovation community.
Headquartered in Leuven (Belgium) and with research sites across Belgium, in the Netherlands, Taiwan and the USA, an rep offices in China and Japan, imec leverages its state-of-the-art R&D infrastructure and its team of about 4,000 expert scientists, to drive open innovation across the globe. They unite world-industry leaders, Flanders-based and international companies, start-ups, and academia and knowledge centers, for R&D in nano-electronics and digital technologies, including advanced semiconductor scaling, silicon photonics, smart health, smart energy, smart mobility and smart cities solutions, artificial intelligence, beyond-5G and sensing technologies and more.
Next to its R&D offering, imec also leverages its expertise and large international industry network to support smaller organizations that have limited in-house R&D resources as well as larger companies with their innovation process from initial idea to fully functioning product, from the design of a product or chip, to prototyping, testing and optimizing, and manufacturing.
Finally, imec supports tech start-ups and scale-ups with a tailored offering. The imec.istart program is a business acceleration program that provides tech entrepreneurs with specialized coaching, facilities and overall support to help them grow their businesses, while the imec.scale-ups program focuses on larger innovative tech scale-ups looking to conquer the European market.
Commissioned by the Flemish government, Lantis is building connections that make the city and region flourish. Lantis is responsible for the realisation of the Oosterweel connection, which will increase prosperity and improve the quality of life. Lantis is contributing to this by promoting mobility, including the construction of numerous bicycle connections and multimodal junctions on the city outskirts of Antwerp.
Lantis strives for operational excellence in order to carry out projects as efficiently as possible and deliver quality. Thanks to intensive cooperation with the surrounding area, the organisation works transparently and with a focus on results. Innovation and transformation ensure future-oriented projects with a lasting impact on the dynamics of the region. This is the Lantis way of successfully realising large projects in an urban environment.
Lantis stands for Liveable Antwerp through Innovation and Cooperation and is a public limited company. The day-to-day management is in the hands of the management committee led by managing director Luc Hellemans. David Van Herreweghe chairs the board of directors.
As Europe’s second-largest port and largest integrated chemical cluster, the Port of Antwerp Bruges is a major lifeline for the Belgian economy: annually around 238 million tonnes of international maritime freight are handled. The Port of Antwerp Bruges accounts, directly and indirectly, for a total of around 143.000 jobs and more than €20 billion added value.
Innovation and digitisation enable our mission to be ‘a home port for a sustainable future’ as we aim to flexibly respond to a rapidly evolving maritime market. By supporting The Beacon, we want to ensure that our port platform finds relevant points of contact and vice versa. Furthermore, we want to facilitate the exchange effect created through the ecosystem being built around The Beacon.
The city of Antwerp welcomes businesses, researchers, citizens and city officials to experiment with smart technologies that aim to make urban life more enjoyable and sustainable. Antwerp is a living lab where solutions are tested and co-created with its inhabitants. The city is home to highly innovative businesses and with 171 nationalities that live in Antwerp, it is above all a very diverse, and international city. The Ecosystem in Antwerp is developing rapidly, over the past years the amount of start-ups and scaleups in Antwerp doubled.
Innovative companies are the driving force behind the Antwerp knowledge economy. Their growth is crucial for our future. The City of Antwerp therefore strongly believes in the power of digital networking and is developing an ecosystem for digital innovation in which large and small businesses, startups, scaleups, researchers and capital providers with an interest in the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence can meet each other. Thanks to the cross-pollination that occurs in The Beacon, innovative products are developed that are relevant to Antwerp’s ‘smart city’ ambitions and to our financial stakeholders: industry and logistics.
The University of Antwerp is a research university where pioneering, innovative research is conducted at an international level. Research and education are closely linked, with 20,000 students and 6000 staff spread across our nine faculties. As a driving force in the Antwerp innovation ecosystem, innovation is a constant focus.
The Beacon is the university’s pioneering pre-incubation structure for the domain of Metropolitanism, Smart City, Mobility & Logistics. It houses the IDLab research group and the Design Sciences Hub.
The IDLab research group of the University of Antwerp and imec performs fundamental and applied research on Wireless technologies, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things. IDLab, headed by prof. Steven Latré, targets the most daunting challenges industry is facing to deliver digital transformation, connecting everything and extracting high value from data. Bringing researchers and industrial partners together at the same location facilitates knowledge transfer and enables the cross-fertilization and co-creation insights on smart cities, IoT and AI towards the industrial partners in The Beacon.
The Design Sciences Hub of the Faculty of Design Sciences is an interdisciplinary innovation and valorization lab. They offer design solutions for urban challenges and wicked problems in the triangle of urban planning, built environment, and urban health.
The new Innovantage episode, featuring Robin Pauwels, COO at The Beacon | Innovation Community .Maxim Golikov and Robin Pauwels will discuss AI's impact on personalized education, healthcare modernization, and community engagement.
The expert guest is the Chief Operating Officer at The Beacon | Innovation Community , a community builder, and a former big data developer, Robin Pauwels.
In this episode, Maxim Golikov and Robin Pauwels will cover the following topics:
💭 How AI enhances personalised education experiences
💭 The role of AI in modernising healthcare systems
💭 Innovative ways AI is used in community engagement
🌟💫 Applications now open for The Captain’s Table 2024 Challenge! 💫🌟
✅ Environment
We are looking for companies that make real money by slashing hashtag#carbon, hashtag#methane, and other hashtag#greenhouse gases, and from fixing our hashtag#oceans and hashtag#waterways. Solutions can range from capture, storage, efficiency enhancing hardware and optimisation. If it helps hashtag#maritime meet our hashtag#emissiontargets, or clean up our environment, we want to hear from you!
✅ Social Impact
No one should get left behind as we transition to a clear and more digitalised way of working. We need solutions that support workers through the transition with consideration to hashtag#education, hashtag#training, hashtag#reskilling, and hashtag#safety.
✅ Governance and Risk Management
Business is risk management. We are seeking smart technologies that hashtag#automate, hashtag#streamline hashtag#riskmanagement to reduce errors, increase efficiency and align with organisational goals.
✅ Digitalised Supply Chains
If you have been following our posts, you know we believe that hashtag#digitalised hashtag#supplychains are essential to creating a more resilient and cleaner supply chain. We seek solutions that digitalise and automate supply chains, enhancing efficiency in hashtag#inventorymanagement, hashtag#portcall hashtag#scheduling, hashtag#etradedocs, hashtag#efinancing, hashtag#dataexchange, hashtag#routeoptimisation and hashtag#procurement.
If you are developing a truly innovative technology that everyone says is awesome, apply now via our new and revamped website:
https://captainstable.hk
Deadline: 31 August 2024
For enquiries, email: [email protected]
Sigli, een digitale transformatie partner, en het Belgische bedrijf Sensotec verlengen hun samenwerking voor onbepaalde tijd na vijf succesvol jaren. In die tijd heeft Sigli Sensotec ondersteund bij verschillende projecten, waaronder AI-ontwikkeling en het maken van leerhulpmiddelen voor mensen met visuele of cognitieve beperkingen. Deze doorlopende samenwerking is erop gericht om de AI-mogelijkheden van Sensotec verder te verbeteren en de functionaliteiten ervan uit te breiden.
Sensotec werkt dagelijks aan het verbeteren van leerhulpmiddelen voor mensen met visuele of cognitieve beperkingen. Met de steun van Sigli, een Litouws bedrijf dat bekendstaat om zijn expertise in digitale transformaties en AI, heeft Sensotec verschillende innovatieve tools ontwikkeld. Een opmerkelijk project is Web2Speech, een AI-gestuurde browserplug-in die webpagina’s hardop voorleest en samenvattingen markeert. Sigli en Sensotec hebben deze tool ontwikkeld, samen met een spraakserver, woordenboek, spellingcontrole en beeldwoordenboek om de gebruikerservaring te verbeteren.
Hun samenwerking heeft onlangs een intuïtieve interface opgeleverd voor kinderen en studenten met leerproblemen. William De Prêtre, hoofd AI bij Sensotec, schrijft hun snelle en efficiënte ontwikkeling toe aan de professionele expertise en het enthousiasme van het team.
Thomas Simono, Managing Director Benelux bij Sigli, gelooft dat hun gezamenlijke inspanningen met Sensotec een voorbeeld zijn van hoe AI de maatschappij inclusiever kan maken. Door leerprocessen te verbeteren, willen ze de slagingspercentages van studenten met een beperking verhogen. Sigli evalueert of AI een bedrijf ten goede kan komen door de beschikbaarheid van gegevens, procesworkflows en het potentieel voor automatisering te onderzoeken. Ze houden ook rekening met de betrouwbaarheid van gegevens, ethische richtlijnen en aankomende regelgeving, zoals de AI Act, te beginnen met een AI-gereedheidsbeoordeling.
De uitgebreide samenwerking tussen Sensotec en Sigli belooft hun innovatieve vermogen te vergroten, waardoor onderwijs en de maatschappij toegankelijker worden voor een bredere groep studenten.
Join us for a Summer Brunch while connecting with the Beacon Community!
We want to know what ideas our Beacon residents have to take our community and building to the next level. Time for a brainstorm!
Join us at The Beacon Community Connect event to meet other members and build a stronger community together!
The Skybar has finally opened its doors. On August 1st The Beacon Community is invited to discover the new bar on the 10th floor!
Come and watch the Euro2024 quarterfinals with fellow Beaconeers over a beer!