Canvas | Community | The Beacon

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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COOCK Workshop - Smart Ports

Digital technologies can definitely support the sustainable growth of companies in the port economy. We selected four technologies that are rising steeply, and on which we'll host a discussion between technology providers and port economy companies.

The format of this event is a moderated and dynamic round table, that will be strictly moderated. In one hour time, participants will be informed about the state-of-the-art of the particular technology, and engage in a structural debate. The objective: to define the enablers to make your company future-proof with digital technology.

There are two rounds of four parallel sessions. Every participant can attend two sessions (e.g. AI and cyber security).

The purpose of this event is to raise awareness among port economy companies, but also to capture latent or manifest innovation cases of challenges.

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Data Meetup September - AWS

Build a modern data lake using AWS Glue and Lake Formation (Engels)
Speaker: Brajendra Singh – Senior Solution Architect – AWS
Organisations are breaking down data silos and building petabyte-scale data lakes on AWS to democratise access to thousands of end users. Learn how to use AWS Glue and Lake Formation to build data lake to help businesses navigate data challenges, optimize analytics processes, and deliver insights to the business faster.

Monitoring the Covid pandemic with a modern AWS Cloud Data platform (Nederlands)
Speaker: Thomas De Block – DevOps Engineer – Big Industries
Big Industries helped the Flemish Government design & set up a modern AWS Cloud Data platform to map Covid contamination outbreaks. Thomas De Block tells us how data from hospitals, residential care centers, general practitioners, contact tracing, etc. gives an idea of where and when infections occurred. The new platform also makes it possible to investigate and communicate where the contamination clusters originate.

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Aloxy raises 3.8 Million Euro to scale up their Industrial IoT solutions globally

Aloxy, a spin-off of imec and University of Antwerp, that develops plug-and-play Internet of Things technology for the chemical and energy industry, closes its next funding round. A consortium of investors, Industrya, QBIC II, Innovation Fund, imec.istart and the University of Antwerp have joined forces with the team to invest € 3.8 million in the scale up and further growth of Aloxy. In the coming year, the company will focus on growing its sales activities as well as expanding the product range and further developing the Aloxy Industrial IoT Hub platform.

With this new round, Aloxy welcomes Industrya as a new investor who led this round. Industrya is a hands-on investment fund that operates exclusively in the industry 4.0, energy and new materials sectors.

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28/06 Eco-Driven Innovation

Energy efficiency and material circularity are the new innovation must-haves in the construction industry. How do you encourage productivity growth and digitization speed? How do you make fundamental changes to meet the rising circular demands?

Join us on Tuesday June 28th at 9h30 to get inspired by experts from UAntwerp, Vandersanden, ETAP and Verhaert on how to unleash your sustainability potential.

Program:
- 9h30: Energy-neutral district architecture with Sven Verbruggen (UAntwerp) & Joris De Lamper (Verhaert)
- 10h05: Sustainability in building materials with Maarten Leën (Vandersanden) & Thomas Van Kerkhoven (Verhaert)
- 10h40: The challenges for a profitable circular business model with Dominiek Plancke (ETAP) & David Pas (Verhaert)

📅 June 28th at 9h30 CEST
📌 Online event
👉 verhaert.com/eco-driven-innovation/

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23/06 AIoT Talks

Join us on Thursday, June 23rdh at 15h30 to get inspired by experts from Henkel, TK Home Solutions, Verhaert and Pegus Digital and find out how they overcame their IoT project challenges and how they made their smart products successful.
📅 June 23rd at 15h30 CEST at 📌Verhaert Kruibeke

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Cubitec nominated for IT project of the year

Exciting news for our community members at Cubitec.

Their project for Bebat has been nominated for IT project of the year in the Enterprise sector by Computable

Bebat is a forerunner when it comes to digital transformation and Cubitec is proud to work with them on a safe future for batteries

More here

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Dockflow launches Europe's first End-to-End Cargo LoraWAN based temperature monitoring service

Massive news from our community members at Dockflow.

The Port of Antwerp, Europe’s second-largest container hub, in collaboration with, Foodcareplus an integrated international logistics provider offering specialty services in the food transportation industry, Dockflow the world’s first integrated logistics enablement platform offering container visibility, and TrakAssure, a leading provider of cargo monitoring solutions based on the ever-growing global LoRaWAN IoT network, have announced a service offering cargo temperature condition monitoring service for logistics assets and cargo, providing exception alerting solutions for cargoes for both shippers and 3PLs.

The solution uses existing LoRaWAN infrastructure at the port, where TrakAssure monitors are installed at load location and data streams into Dockflow’s servers via API, allowing it to be shared with relevant stakeholders in the cold chain.

You can read all about this exciting news here

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Geosparc announces partnership

Great news for our community members at Geosparc.

GEOSPARC announced at the Intertraffic conference a partnership in the development of data-driven mobility management.
A Geosparc platform trusted by numerous cities and municipalities across the Benelux region will now be powered by Mobilisis parking sensors.

More here

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Blog 13 // Urban Sense

Urban Sense is the consortium between Cegeka and Sirus and offers a data platform on which cities and municipalities can disclose all possible types of data.

In this Blog - Cegeka and Sirus go in depth on the dataplatform that urban sense offers.

Click here for the full blog

Blog is in dutch

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Aloxy secures US patent

Aloxy is happy to announce the US patent is granted for the Aloxy valve position sensor.

Great news for our community members who are working hard on expanding in the US market.

Read the full article here

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Skyebase wins innovation award

Great news for our community members at Skyebase.

On the M+R fair in Antwerp, Skyebase was presented the innovation award with their new wall-and coating thickness measurement drone solution

A wonderful recognition for the Skyebase Team

Click here for more

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Partnership Inuits x Dockflow

Amazing news from our community.

Our community members at Inuits are investing in an other community member, Dockflow !

Kris Kerremans invests in this logistics company, and the Inuits community will support them with scaling the technology and developing a future-proof solution.

This is what the beacon is all about - companies getting together and coorperate

read here all about the partnership

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Event - ReThinking Newspace

Innovating earth observation starts with improving optics in micro- & nanosatellites, data processing through algorithms and embedded AI. Let's innovate NewSpace and start space commercialization, join ReThinking NewSpace on 29 March organized by @Lambda-X, @VerhaertMastersInInnovation, @VITO & @Aerospacelab. During this webinar their experts will share insights on EO application challenges.
4 sessions, 4 EO challenges 🌏
✔Providing daily global coverage
✔Developing optical designs for micro- & nanosatellites
✔Preserving data quality through in orbit calibration
✔Processing EO data using AI
Register now for this webinar on March 29th!
👉 https://bit.ly/3JS9Qyc

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Blog 12 // Introduction to Jax

In this 12th blog post by ML6's software engineer, Jasper Van den Bossche gives an introduction to JAX, a machine learning framework by Google AI Research. He explains how JAX works, how it is different from Tensorflow/Pytorch and explain why he thinks it is worth adding to your arsenal of tools as a machine learning engineer.

Read the full blog here

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Software AG announces the acquisition of Streamsets

Exciting news from our community members at Software AG.

They have announcement the agreement to acquire Streamsets Inc, a leader in data integration for the modern data stack.

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Blog 11 // Create your own shareable Tensorboard with authentication on GCP

In this blogpost ML6's ML engineer Tim De Smet explains how to create your own shareable Tensorboards with authentication on GCP in a cost-effective way. This post includes the Terraform setup so that the solution can be replicated with ease.

You can find the full blogpost here

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The Beacon announces new community members

After two low-profile years, The Beacon | Innovation Community has started onboarding new Community Members . Proximus is our first The Beacon Champion , startup Rollo is one of our newest residents, and powerhouses Siemens, Positive Thinking Company and Lab Box have reinforced the community!

You can find the members in our list and if you want to meet them feel free to sent victor, the community manager a message.

The February update will come very soon

The city of Antwerp presents new electric charging sations

Exciting news from the city of Antwerp.

he City of #Antwerp has presenting new electric charging stations in collaboration with TotalEnergies and community member GEOSPARC.
In order to meet the increasing demand for electric charging capacity, the city of Antwerp is stepping up its efforts. 💡

In the coming years, TotalEnergies will install and operate charging stations in the public domain. Geosparc is responsible for optimizing the use of the charging station infrastructure and will install sensors in the car parking. These register which spaces are occupied and for how long and are integrated into a smart city middleware data platform.

Congrats to all parties involved - a step further to a sustainable future

Read the full Article here

Article is in Dutch

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Port of Antwerp select the 6th NeTWorK for drone roll-out

Congrats to our partner Port of Antwerp, they have recruited the 6th NeTWorK consortium to help in the roll-out of a large-scale drone project.

The group made up of DroneMatrix, Proximus, and SkeyDrone will support the launch of the port's 'D-Hive – Operation drone capacity for the Port of Antwerp' project.

You can find the full article here

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Seafar in The Tijd

Our Community members at Seafar got an extensive interview in The Tijd.

They talked about Seafar itself and the future plans of the company

You can check the full article here.

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