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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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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Cubitec selected for Scale.Cities initiative

Exciting news from our community members at Cubitec.

Cubitec has beeen selected as one of the 5 Antwerp scaleups for Scale.Cities.

The SCALE.CITIES initiative aims to test, scale and prove scaleups’ solutions in the food, energy, waste, and mobility domains.

Very exciting what comes next.

You can read the full post here

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Blog 10 // Open source podcast with Aloxy

In our 10th blogpost Aloxy's CCO, Frank Gielissen and CTO, Glenn Ergeerts went on a podcqst show discussing their approach to open source and explained more about Aloxy and their IIOT solution for annual valve monitoring.

You can listen the full podcast here

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Verhaert acquires AFCE

Exciting news from our community members at Verhaert.
To boost their customers’ capacity to innovate, they are proud to announce the acquisition of the AfCE - Academy for Corporate Entrepreneurship. With the shared vision of turning that statistic upside down, AfCE will complement Verhaert’s services by offering courses, incubation & acceleration programs, tools and services to support internal innovation.

More here

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Rombit raises 25 million

Amazing news from our community members at Rombit.

They have raised 25 million and with their series B funding round, led by the Belgian government, they are ready to scale their operations further and provide their customers the products to ensure real-time risk management.

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NxtPort launches movie to highlight activities

NxtPort international have launched a new movie to highlight their activities for ports.

You can check it here

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Blog 9 // The safety concerns about 5G

In our ninth blog, Our community members at Citymesh wrote about the health & safety concerns about 5G and the risks attached to it.

Two arguments keep coming up: the fact that 5G's radio frequency would be harmful, and the fact that 5G requires a larger number of antennas than its predecessors. Citymesh will take a closer look at these arguments and what scientific research on the subject tells us.

Note : The Blog is in Dutch

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Dockflow featured in Trends

Pauline van Ostaeyen, the co-founder of dockflow has given an in-depth interview about the journey that dockflow already has walked so far.

You can find the full interview here

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Port of Antwerp starts using drones to detect debris

One of the mail partners of The Beacon, The Port of Antwerp is deploying drones using an in-house developed machine vision model.

You'll find more about this exciting innovation here

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Blog 8 // how to tackle the big challenges as we move into the era of 6G

In the eight blog Imec's Maikel Peeters explains in a virtual talk how to tackle the big challenges as we move into the era of 6G pre-competitive research.

You can find the full presentation here.

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Blog 7 // Vertex AI Tensorboard alternative for smaller budgets

In the 7th blogpost - ML6's ML engineer Maximilian Gartz takes a look at the new Vertex AI managed TensorBoard pricing model and provides an alternative, serverless and cost-efficient solution on GCP

You'll find the full blog here

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Blog 6 // The definition of the perfect product

In the sixth blog you'll find the definition of the perfect product and the innovation principles behind it.

Verhaert's Frederik wouters discusses how data-based intangible innovation can improve user experience, product efficiency & process, to give you a competitive advantage.

Read the full blog here

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Cegeka aquires a stake in Solver Sweden

Exciting news from our community members at Cegeka.

Cegeka have acquired a majority stake in the data specialist Solver Sweden. This strategic partnership is part of Cegeka's strategy to respond to the ever-growing demand for data and AI partners.

Congrats to Cegeka for this milestone.

More here

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Aloxy expands into North America

Exciting news from our community members at Aloxy.

They are expanding into the North American market. This is another milestone on the growth path of Aloxy and strategically important to develop Their business in the US.

Congrats !

More information here

Website

Blog 5 // How do we prevent our developers from waiting too long

Our community members at BubblyDoo are starting the BubblyDoo Engineering Blog where they will dive into the most interesting programming topics at their company.

Want to know more about the plugin Founder & CTO Hans Otto wrote to keep their deploy times short?

More here

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Faktion is looking for talent

Our community members at Faktion are looking for a lot of talent with technical backgrounds.

Are you interested or do you know people that fit these profiles ?

Be sure to check it out here.

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